LIFE AND LETTERS 

Essays hy J. C. SQUIRE 



By the Same Author 



VERSE 
POEMS. First Series 

THE BIRDS AND OTHER POEMS 

THE moon: a Poem 

THE SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST 



PARODIES 

imaginary SPEECHES 
STEPS TO PARNASSUS 
TRICKS OF THE TRADE 

PROSE 

THE GOLD TREE 
BOOKS IN GENERAL. 

By Solomon Eagle 
BOOKS IN GENERAL. Secoud Scries. 
Bif Solom/)n Eagle 



THE COLLECTED POEMS OF JAMES ELROY 

FLECKER. Edited with an Introduction 



LIFE AND LETTERS 

Essays by ' 

J. C. SQUIRE 



NEW '^SIP YORK 
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 






COPYRIGHT, 19S1, 
BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 



•^" 



JUN 2\ 1921 

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OP AMERICA 



ICI.A614779 



TO 
EDWARD SHANKS 



NOTE 

The contents of this volume are a selection from 
articles published weekly in Land and Water 
since early in 1917. J. C. S. 



CONTENTS 






PAGE 


Childhood in Retkospect 


13 


Keats's Fame 


20 


Short Cuts to Helicon . . . . 


29 


Edward Thomas 


36 


The Wallet of Kai-Lung . 


44 


One 

^^ Anatole France 


52 
58 


Natural Writing .... 


. 66 


Secret History 


74 


Mr. Asquith as Author . 


85 


The Infinitives That Were Split 


93 


Dr. Johnson 


100 


A Puzzle 


107 


Tom Thumb 


114 


Sidelights on the Victorians 


121 


Sir Charles Dilke .... 


. 129 


The Utopian Satirist 


. 137 


Jane Austen's Centenary 


145 


Mr. Conrad's Masterpiece 


. 153 



TU 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

Four Papers on Shakespeare . .161 

I. Shakespeare's Workmanship . 161 

II. The Blackamoor .... 168 

III. Hamlet 175 

IV. Shakespeare's Sonnets . . 182 
The Great Unfinished . . . .189 

Walt Whitman 196 

Rohmer 203 

Pope 210 

God Save the King 217 

Midshipman Easy 224 

Jane Ca\^ 232 

Galleries 239 

Initials 247 

Recitation in Public .... 254 

Humane Education 261 

A Subject 269 

GoAKs AND Humour 276 

A Corner of Old England . . . 292 

A Poet's Pedigree 300 

Rabelais 307 

Fame After Death ..... 315 



TUl 



LIFE AND LETTERS 



CHILDHOOD IN RETROSPECT 

Mr. W. H. Hudson is known to many 
— though not to as many as he should be — 
as one of the closest and most affectionate 
living students of birds and beasts, and at 
the same time as the possessor of a simple and ex- 
cellent English style. A Shepherd's Life and 
the studies of wild life at the Land's End and 
in La Plata have frequently been described as 
the nearest things we have to the work of Richard 
Jefferies, and the description is justified. Mr. 
Hudson has now, in a book boldly entitled Far 
Away and Long Ago, written a history of his 
early years. A succession of old scenes came 
back to him very clearly during a convalescence, 
and he wrote them down while they were fresh. 
He has made with them his best book. 

For a book of the kind, it is very diversified. 
The tone is not varied, the writing glides smoothly 
on, and the details, whatever their nature, are 
harmonized and made coherent by that golden at- 
mosphere, that even transparent glaze rather, 
that gives kinship to all things remembered from 

[13] 



LIFE AND LETTERS 

childhood. But in its material surroundings his 
was no ordinary English childhood, and he was 
not an ordinary child. He was born, in the 
middle of the last century, on the pampas, where 
his amiable and cultivated parents raised sheep 
amidst very rough surroundings. The young 
republic was dominated by the Dictator Rosas, 
" the Nero of South America " ; the Hudsons' 
servants and the most of their neighbours were 
wild gauchos, reckless and cruel, whose festive 
evenings commonly ended in fights with knives. 
At an early age he saw a beaten army straggle 
past his house and murder was a word soon 
familiar to him. He gives many sketches of 
the men and women of that day, some of them 
noble, others utterly vile, but all picturesque in 
raiment and individual in action ; and the strange- 
ness of the natives is heightened by their con- 
trast with the few early English or Scotch set- 
tlers still clinging to their native conventions. 
Into that strange community, living in low estan- 
cias scattered over the almost treeless plain still 
full of birds and beasts, strange vagrants wan- 
dered, always on horseback. One was an Eng- 
lish schoolmaster who would stay at a place for 
months, then lose his temper and his job, mount 
his horse, and head for the horizon. Another 
was the most remarkable beggar in literature: 

[14] 



CHILDHOOD IN RETROSPECT 

" He wore a pair of gigantic shoes, about a 
foot broad at the toes, made out of thick cowhide, 
with the hair on ; and on his head was a tall rim- 
less cowhide hat shaped like an inverted flower- 
pot. His bodily covering was, however, the most 
extraordinary: the outer garment, if garment 
it can be called, resembled a very large 
mattress in size and shape, with the ticking of 
innumerable pieces of raw hide sewn together. 
It was about a foot in thickness and stuffed 
with sticks, stones, hard lumps of clay, rams' 
horns, bleached bones, and other hard, heavy 
objects; it was fastened round him with straps 
of hide, and reached nearly to the ground." 

This freak does not seem so singular in his sur- 
roundings as out of them. And there are many 
others, including a lady who, when St. Antony 
did not send her fine weather, let his image down 
a well to discover how he liked the wet. They 
pass over the pages in sequence, come and go; 
none stay but the family, who linger in the back- 
ground, a dim but friendly group. 

Mr. Hudson's passion for nature, nourished 
by his mother, developed early. The naturalist 
who was to spend years watching English rooks 
and starlings, began by staring in fascination 
at scissor-tail tyrant-birds, ostriches and flam- 



LIFE AND LETTERS 

ingoes. At an age when his literary contem- 
poraries were, at most, ferreting for rabbits, he 
was trying to catch an armadillo by the tail — 
the beast, which escaped by burrowing, threaten- 
ing to drag him into an early tomb if he did not 
let go. He has none of those astounding stories 
with which he has sometimes tested one's capac- 
ity for belief — such as that, told five or six 
years ago, about the swan which was in love 
with a trout, followed it daily all over the lake, 
and finally attacked the angler who caught it. 
But he saw a dog which dived and caught fish; 
and he came upon two deer, a ring of does 
around them, fighting with horns which locked, 
and never unlocked when they died. He would 
lie awake in the darkness listening to the snakes 
sliding and whispering under the floor: snakes 
fascinated him, with their menacing move- 
ments and their rich lines. There were green 
and grey snakes, green and velvet-black snakes, 
snakes with bellies barred bright blue and crim- 
son; and he found, and several times tracked 
down, an unknown velvet-black snake, six feet 
long, which once drew its heavy length right 
over his foot as he stood looking into a tree. 
But it is of the birds and the flowers, and the 
few and precious groves of trees, that he writes 
most. Of birds, he must mention hundreds; 
[i6] 



CHILDHOOD IN RETROSPECT 

and the most beautiful of all, he says, were the 
flamingoes. He describes, with emotion but 
without laboured effort, how, as a child of six, 
he walked over a league of meadow, and came 
suddenly to a wide water where multitudes of 
birds — wild duck, swans, ibises, herons, and 
spoonbills — waded or swam ; and nearest " three 
immensely taU white and rose-coloured birds, 
wading solemnly in a row a yard or so apart 
from one another . . . My delight was in- 
tensified when the leading bird stood still and, 
raising his head and long neck aloft, opened 
and shook his wings. For the wings, when 
open, were of a glorious crimson colour, and 
the bird was to me the most angel-like creature 
on earth." He describes later sights of flam- 
ingoes, standing reflected in a still river at sun- 
set, flying low over blue water in a long crim- 
son line; but the most beautiful picture he 
paints is not here, but is to be found in a dec- 
orative effect which, in its way, not all nature 
could excel. There was an orchard of great 
old peach-trees, with black trunks, standing on 
a carpet of grass, covered with mounds of rosy- 
pink blossoms. In these trees thousands of little 
yellow birds often sat and sang; and one day 
a flock of small parrakeets came and sat 
on the twigs, amid the blossom. Such a 

[17] 



LIFE AND LETTERS 

picture is fragrant in the memory for a lifetime. 
The setting of Mr. Hudson's tale is exotic; 
yet the history is familiar; for, where obstinate 
calamities have been avoided, it is only in ines- 
sentials that men's early memories differ. The 
country of which Mr. Hudson writes is not 
Argentina; it is the country of childhood, a 
farther and more beautiful place; and there all 
men have lived, though not in all men are its 
impressions equally deep or its influences 
equally living, and few make a habit of revisit- 
ing it in imagination. A village street, a 
church, elms, farmyards and great hollow 
barns, a blacksmith's forge, meadows with cows, 
a reedy stream; a fishing-harbour, where nets 
are dried on the hill and the gulls forage the 
mud for offal at low tide; a rusty industrial 
suburb, builders' yards, geraniums, a black 
canal, and green and red signals in the night: 
they are all the substantial provinces of that 
unsubstantial land; the air of them, the speech, 
the manners, are the same. There were birds, 
animals, bearded old men, and a slight reticent 
little girl with pale complexion and flying hair. 
Aksakoff on the steppes beyond the Volga, 
Goethe remembering the gabled streets and 
berobed councillors of Imperial Frankfort, 
they are looking back on the same world: a 
[i8] 



CHILDHOOD IN RETROSPECT 

world extraordinarily vivid and picturesque, 
where the strong were more strong, the sweet 
more angelic, the quaint more odd; where the 
young newcomer first learned to know in 
others brutality and love, in himself curiosity 
and silence, fear, cunning, sympathy, ambition, 
courage, and cowardice, the desire and dread of 
danger, resentment, fierce grief, and despair; 
where scents were acute to the nostrils, where 
bright colours were first seen, and the wonders 
of the elements first learned, the sun, the moon, 
clouds, sky, and stars, trees, flowers and water 
in its various forms, the wide whiteness of 
snow, the terror of thunder at night, the steely 
persistence of heavy rains. Time was long 
there, before we bothered to count or needed 
to use the minutes, and under the shadow of 
powerful authority we enjoyed a liberty like no 
other liberty; new things came unendingly and 
adventure was all around. We did not know 
then that we lived there, and our elders usually 
forgot it; but we know thirty years afterwards. 
The knowledge makes the contemplative sort of 
artist, in whom the mood of retrospection often 
becomes dominant, desire to set it down before 
he dies and one reporter has been lost. From 
this cause many beautiful books have come; and 
the book that has not yet been written will be 
the loveliest and saddest in the world. 

[19] 



KEATS'S FAME 

A HUNDRED years ago Keats's first volume 
of poetry was published; and Sir Sidney 
Colvin's new Life, which, humanly speaking, 
must be the definitive biography of the poet, is 
a " centenary tribute " which renders any other 
unnecessary. That first volume, which ap- 
peared when Keats was twenty-one, contained, 
as every critic has observed, much immature 
and much bad work. Lines like 

Of him whose name to ev'ry heart's a solace 
High-minded and unbending William Wallace. 

which Sir Sidney Colvin does not quote, beat 
on their own ground Leigh Hunt's 

The two divinest things the world has got 
A lovely woman in a rural spot, 

which he does quote. But when everything 
possible has been extracted to illustrate the 
tremendous progress Keats made in two years, 
the fact remains that there were scattered 
everywhere in the book, passages which might 

[20] 



KEATS'S FAME 

have shown any one but a dolt that this was a 
great poet in the making, and that it contained, 
moreover, To One who has been long in city 
pent; Sleep and Poetry, and, above all, the 
Sonnet on Chapman's Homer. 

The reception that it got is notorious. " The 
book," says Cowden Clarke, " might have 
emerged in Timbuctoo with far stronger chance 
of fame and appreciation. The whole commun- 
ity, as if by compact, seemed determined to 
know nothing about it." This is a slight exag- 
geration. There was a little sale; and this is 
how the publisher alludes to it: 

" By far the greater number of persons who 
have purchased it from us have found fault 
with it in such plain terms, that we have in 
many cases offered to take it back rather than 
be annoyed with the ridicule which has, time 
after time, been showered upon it. In fact, 
it was only on Saturday last that we were 
under the mortification of having our own 
opinion of its merits flatly contradicted by a 
gentleman, who told us he considered it ' no 
better than a take-in.' " 

The critics, however, said little about it (except 
that Keats was unclean) ; their efforts were 
reserved for Endymion, which came out next 

[21] 



LIFE AND LETTERS 

year. With this the friends of " that amiable 
but infatuated young bardhng, Mister John 
Keats," could no longer complain that he was 
entirely ignored. Blackwood led the pack, the 
Quarterly and the British Critic following. 
Here is Blackwood's peroration: 

" And now, good morrow to the * Muses' son 
of Promise ' ; as for the feats he yet ' may do,' 
as we do not pretend to say like himself, 
' Muse of my native land am I inspired,' we 
shall adhere to the safe old rule of pauca verba. 
We venture to make one small prophecy, that 
his bookseller will not a second time venture 
£50 upon anything he can write. It is a better 
and a wiser thing to be a starved apothecary 
than a starved poet; so back to the shop, Mr. 
John, back to ' plasters, pills, and ointment 
boxes,' etc. But, for Heaven's sake, young 
Sangrado, be a little more sparing of extenu- 
atives and soporifics in your practice than you 
have been in your poetry." 

This passage is well known. What is not so 
generally realized is the slowness with which the 
appreciation of him spread even after his death. 
He had died, and Shelley's great elegy on him 
was under review, when Blackwood resumed 
with a reference to him as 

[22] 



KEATS'S FAME 

" a young man who had left a decent calling 
for the melancholy trade of Cockney-poetry 
and has lately died of a consmnption after hav- 
ing written two or three little books of verse 
much neglected by the public." 

A comic analysis of Adonais, with parodies on 
it, followed. A few men knew what Keats was ; 
Lamb, Shelley, Leigh Hunt and Keats's young 
friends. Reynolds, in a later letter, said : " He 
had the greatest power of poetry in him, of 
anyone since Shakespeare." Eight years after 
his death a group of young Cambridge men, 
including Tennyson, Fitzgerald, Sterling, 
Arthur Hallam, and Monckton Milnes — 
Browning, as a boy, had already been inspired 
by him — were the first group of enthusiasts who 
had not known him in the flesh. But the pun- 
dits still remained secure in their crassness. It 
was in 1832 that the Quarterly, reviewing 
Tennyson's poems, wrote of him as 

" a new prodigy of genius — another and 
brighter star of a galaxy, or milky way of poetry, 
of which the lamented Keats was the har- 
binger." 

Jeers at Keats*s failure with the pubhc were 
still well founded in fact. Keats had been dead 

[23] 



LIFE AND LETTERS 

nineteen years when the first reprint of his 
collected poems appeared; and this went into 
remainders with Browning's Bells and Pome- 
granates. Four years after this Lord Jeffrey, 
still flourishing, observed that Keats and 
Shelley were falling into oblivion, and that of 
the poets of their age, Campbell and Rogers 
were those destined for immortality. Lord 
Houghton's edition of 1848 marks the date of 
the general recognition of Keats as one of the 
greatest of our poets. The maintenance and 
increase of his fame since then cannot be 
described in detail. " Keats," said Tennyson, 
" would have become one of the very greatest 
of all poets had he lived. At the time of his 
death there was apparently no sign of exhaus- 
tion or having written himself out; his keen 
poetical instinct was in full process of develop- 
ment at the time. Each new effort was a 
steady advance on that which had gone before. 
With all Shelley's splendid imagery and colour, 
I find a sort of tenuity in his poetry." Again, 
" Keats, with his high spiritual vision, would 
have been, if he had lived, the greatest of us." 
And the noblest tribute of all is the Essay by 
the present Poet Laureate, indisputably the 
finest thing that has been written about him, 
and one of the most penetrating, direct and 

[24] 



KEATS'S FAME 

— there is no other word — business-like critical 
studies in existence. " If," concludes that 
essay, 

"if I have read him rightly, he would be 
pleased, could he see it, at the universal recog- 
nition of his genius, and the utter rout of its 
traducers; but much more moved, stirred he 
would be to the depth of his great nature to 
know that he was understood, and that for the 
nobility of his character his name was loved and 
esteemed." 

And the words are all the more impressive as 
they end a study which is utterly unsparing 
in its detection and analysis of Keats's faults. 

" High spiritual vision," " the nobility of 
his character"; the phrases will still sound 
strange to those who take their conception of 
Keats from erroneous but hard-dying legend. 
He died of consumption; he wrote, when 
dying, love-letters which in places are morbid, 
though they are not, as a whole, so " deplor- 
able " as is usually made out ; and Byron gave 
universal currency to the delusion that he was 
killed by hostile criticism. This combination 
of facts has perpetuated the notion that he was 
a neurotic weakling with a hectic genius. 
It is all hopelessly wrong. Those who knew 

[2S] 



LIFE AND LETTERS 

him thought him the manliest of men. Anec- 
dotes like that of his hour's successful fight 
with a butcher twice his size whom he had 
caught ill-treating a cat, are unnecessary as 
corroboration; for corroboration is present 
everywhere in his letters, and frequently in his 
poems. A man who was killed by scurrilous 
blockheads of reviewers would be a weakling. 
But — except for the fact that attacks on him 
made it impossible to earn money by his 
poetry — he was indifferent to what was said 
about him. Every great poet knows his own 
capabilities; and Keats's opinion of those 
who were vilifying him was briefly expressed: 
" This is a mere matter of the moment; I think 
I shall be among the English Poets after my 
death." He was not over confident. He 
discriminated between his good and his bad 
work: "My ideas with respect to it" (that 
is, EndT/mion) ^ he said, "are very low"; 
and a little later, " I am three and twenty, 
with little knowledge, and middling intellect. 
It is true that in the height of enthusiasm I 
have been cheated into some fine passages; but 
that is not the thing." But the only thing he 
was uncertain about was whether he had done 
anything good enough to show what was in 
him: 

[26] 



KEATS'S FAME 

" If I should die, said I to myself, I have left 
no immortal work behind me — nothing to make 
my friends proud of my memory — but I have 
loved the principle of beauty in all things, and 
if I had time I would have made myself 
remembered." 

Of that he was never doubtful. Ajid he knew 
accurately the conflicting but not irreconcilable 
tendencies within himself; the tendency to 
luxuriate and the tendency to " philosophise." 
At the beginning the former predominated. He 
wandered, often led by the rhyme, through 
mazes of soft and luscious imagery; he held 
that the greatest poet was he who said the 
most "heart-easing" things; and the list of 
his favourite adjectives, compiled by Mr. 
Bridges, illustrates very strikingly the lan- 
guorous quality of his dreams and desires. 
But he was not made to be a slave to these: 
in the Odes and Hyperion, the richness and 
vividness and sweetness remained, but the 
tropical luxuriance had been pruned, and the 
native strength of his character and intellect, 
the clarity of his imagination, the absolute 
accuracy of phraseology of which he was 
capable, appear with a splendour that makes 
these poems incomparable with everything 

[27] 



LIFE AND LETTERS 

else in our literature but the greatest passages 
of Shakespeare and Milton. " I think," he said, 
" poetry should surprise by a fine excess, and 
not by singularity; it should strike the reader 
as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and 
appear almost a remembrance." 

I have not quoted Keats; I have barely 
referred to a few of his poems; I have made 
no attempt to discover the secret of his great- 
ness or expose the beauties of his art. In a 
space like this, one is forced to fasten on one 
or two details only when dealing with so 
great a writer as Keats and so solid a 
biography as Sir Sidney Colvin's. The 
structure and peculiar merits of Sir Sidney's 
volume one must also ignore. But all the 
material one could ask for is here; the poet's 
art and thought are very fully illustrated from 
his own words; there are several important 
additions to our knowledge of him; and the 
long critical chapters, especially those on 
Endymion and Isabella, are as exhaustive and 
sensible as they are unaffected. 



[28] 



SHORT CUTS TO HELICON 

I OPENED the Times Literary Supplement, 
and my eye was detained by an advertisement 
which for ten minutes made me oblivious 
to everything else in the number from 
" Dramatic Poetry " to " God and the Abso- 
lute." It was one of those rare advertisements 
which induce a train of thought. 

And this was it. An institution called the 
London Correspondence College was inviting 
the Supplements readers to learn how to 
write verse. " The field for Verse," ran the 
invitation, 

" is much larger than most people suppose. 
Hundreds of journals publish and pay for 
poetry. Anyone with aptitude can learn to 
write the kind of Verse editors will pay for, 
by availing themselves of the excellent course 
of Instruction provided by . . . The train- 
ing is individual and progressive; technique is 
simply explained, and any natural ability 
the student may have is developed to the full 

[29] 



LIFE AND LETTERS 

through his or her own work in connection 
with the lessons. The fee is quite moderate." 

It was bound to come, and here it is. 

I should greatly like to know — but I suppose 
that I could not find out without paying 
money, which I am reluctant to do — what are 
the suggestions, what the training, given to 
those who serve with the College their appren- 
ticeship to the Muse. But I do not know, and 
I dare not guess, as secrets beyond my 
conjecture and stunts beyond my devisal may 
have been hit upon by the Professors of the 
College, and I should not like even to 
appear to misrepresent the nature, or the 
benefits, of their teaching. I may, however, 
without speculating as to what is their practice, 
be allowed to reflect on what would be my own 
should I ever find myself in control of an 
Academy of Shorthand, Typewriting, and 
Commercial Poetry. 

Were this country America, or did the 
present Ajnerican fashion for free verse spread 
here, the problem would be comparatively 
uncomplicated. " Technique " could certainly 
be simply explained, as both rhyme and 
regular rhythm are foregone, the poet can 
indefinitely vary his lines, and, for the content, 

[30] 



\ 



SHORT CUTS TO HELICON 

all that is necessary is a catalogue of objects 
seen, heard, and smelt by the writer at any 
particular moment or series of moments. 
Here, dealing with the novice, one would 
instruct him on his morning walks to make a 
careful note of the objects he saw, and recapitu- 
late their leading characteristics when he got 
home; then, killing with one stone the two 
birds of memory-training and art, he would 
catalogue any sequence of them. For instance: 
" misty air, a long straight street of flat houses, 
a solitary policeman in a shiny cape, a red 
pillar-box, a boy in the distance, whistling a 
tune." The next stage in the process would 
be to write these things down in irregular 
lines, the shorter the better, made up according 
to the author's taste or caprice. The last and 
finishing process consists of the judicious, 
or even the quite casual, interspersal of dots, 
and the addition of some single line of reflec- 
tion, or exclamation which supplies the neces- 
sary touch of emotion. It would not be safe 
to leave the student to his own devices at the 
start; he could quite safely be given a little 
list of last lines which could be used (prefer- 
ably in italics) in any poem of the kind. " Oh, 
God! . . ." is one; "Ah! the pain," is 
another. Behold the final result: 

[31] 



LIFE AND LETTERS 

Misty air . . . 

A long, straight street 

Of flat houses . . . 

A solitary policeman 

With a shiny 

Cape . . . 

A red pillar-box . . . 

A boy 

In the distance 

Whistling a tune. 

Ah, God! the pain. 

That, though I may not be able to persuade 
English readers that this is so, is the sort of 
" Verse " that in America " editors will pay 
for," and there is no reason why its construc- 
tion should not be quite successfully taught 
by post. But on this side of the Atlantic things 
are a little more difficult. 

In England " Hundreds of journals publish 
and pay for poetry," but almost all of them 
insist upon rhyme, and upon lines of equal, or 
regularly varying length. Moreover, there is 
a good deal of difference between the sort of 
subjects and styles demanded by various 
papers. I should, therefore, when framing 
my course for students, begin by telling them 
to study (as every successful business man is 
bound to do) the market, and the classes of 
goods most in demand by the various groups 

[32] 



SHORT CUTS TO HELICON 

of consumers. Let the student note (a) 
the commonest subject, (b) the commonest 
rhymes, (c) the commonest words, in the poems 
published by those papers which he decides 
to exploit. After a little labour he will be 
able to sort the papers into three or four main 
categories. He will then decide either to 
produce several types of goods for the several 
types of customer, or to concentrate on the 
largest available market for a single type, 
thereby giving himself a chance of perfecting 
his processes, and, by virtue of the advantages 
inherent in repetitive work, secui'ing maximum 
output and reducing overhead charges (in 
which I include the purchase of magazines to 
see if they have printed anything yet) to a 
minimum. Let us suppose he decides to adopt 
the latter, and most efficient, course. 

In accordance with the instructions I have 
given him, he has found that the subjects 
most in demand in his group of consumers 
are (say) love, flowers, joy coming after sorrow, 
sunset, and maternal affection. The statistical 
tables drawn up after examination of a 
thousand specimen poems have revealed that 
the separate words (excluding, of course, 
articles and conjunctions) most frequently 
required are " moon," " roses," " twilight," 

[33] 



LIFE AND LETTERS 

" slumber," " lullaby," " you," " blackbird," 
" joy," " sorrow," and " to-morrow " — the last 
two, for obvious reasons, being bracketed equal. 
Amongst the most frequent of the other rhymes 
are found " moon " and " June," " you " and 
"blue," "heart" and "apart," "love" and 
"above," "stars" and "bars," "sun" and 
" done." Now, whatever liberties may be taken 
by the advanced student ripe for original ex- 
periment and research, I should always advise 
the beginner who means to play for safety and 
avoid the risk of disappointment to keep as 
closely to the beaten path as possible. He may 
or may not save himself trouble by sticking 
boldly, whenever he writes, to the metre and 
rhymes of a particular poem in his card-index 
file. If he prefers to be original he should at 
least always choose metres and rhymes which he 
knows, from his tables, to be always popular. Let 
us say that he decides on a poem about love of 
eight lines, in two four-line stanzas. For this, 
if every line (and editors greatly like that) is 
to have a rhyme, four sets of two rhymes are 
necessary. How should he next proceed? 
How select his rhymes? 

To assist him here I should provide him 
with a little catechism for each class of subject. 
He can get right there with a few standard 

[34] 



SHORT CUTS TO HELICON 

questions such as: (1) Is it to be a happy- 
poem? and (2) What time of day is it (the love, 
or the meditation on flowers, or the maternal 
affection) to take place? These questions give 
a principle of selection; for instance, in a poem 
about the day, the sun will properly appear; in 
one about the night moon or stars may be intro- 
duced. Our poet has finally decided on love, 
and on the rhymes " love " and " above," 
" moon " and " June," " flowers " and " hours," 
" blue " and " you." Now it is clear that he can 
make the lines scan by counting the syllables; 
but where I am in difficulties about assisting him 
is in regard to the manner in which he shall fill 
the lines up. It is no good telling him to make 
them as like his models as possible ; he could guess 
that much for himself. But suppose he gets as 
far as this: 

[It is a perfect night in] June, 

[No breezes shake the] flowers, 
[The golden radiance of the] moon 

[Doth gild the slumbering] hours. 

[I wait beneath your casement,] love, 
[ ] blue, 

[ ] above, 

[The moon, the rose, and] you, 

and cannot fill up the gaps? I honestly do 
not know what advice to give. 

[35] 



EDWARD THOMAS 

Edwakd Thomas, who was killed in France 
in 1917, at the age of thirty-nine, wrote a large 
number of prose books. Even when foi^ced to 
produce books for money he wrote with distinc- 
tion and thought for himself; and the best of 
his English travel books are the work of a 
man saturated with every aspect of the country. 
For nearly twenty years he wrote no verse, 
but in 1913 he began writing poetry profusely. 
Only a few of his friends knew that "Edward 
Eastaway," who appeared in an anthology in 
1917, was he. He was very shy about his 
verse and had prepared for publication a 
volume over the same pseudonym. His poems 
have now appeared with his real name on them. 
They make beyond comparison his best book; 
and there have been few books so good in our 
time. 

Thomas was a tall, quiet, reserved man with 
melancholy eyes and strong hands, browner 
than those of professional writers usually 
are. His poems are like him, they are personal 

[36] 



EDWARD THOMAS 

in spirit and substance; they have his quiet- 
ness, his sadness and his strength. When 
there is profound emotion behind them it is 
characteristically expressed in few words and 
a slight troubled movement of the verse. The 
language is simple and direct, with few made 
phrases, inversions or fine adjectives; it 
moves slowly and reflectively, attuned to his 
prevailing mood, which might be called a 
mood of resignation if that word did not seem 
to preclude the inexhaustible freshness of his 
response to the beauty of earth, " lovelier than 
any mysteries." He felt always the pain of 
death, and change, but that never clouded 
his faculty for enjoying things; in his ecstasy 
over the endless miracles of the earth he was 
sobered by his knowledge of their transience, 
but he was not one of those dismal people 
to whom every ephemeral thing is first and 
foremost an illustration of the power of the 
abstractions death and change. He loved 
things for themselves and thought of their 
beauty more than of their brevity. 

His poems are poems of the earth and of 
one man who looked at it, not knowing how 
long he would be able to. It is a lonely man who 
wanders through the book; when he speaks of 
other people they are memories or else faintly 

[37] 



LIFE AND LETTERS 

and remotely in the background. His human 
relations here are, we feel, subsidiary to, less 
intense and passionate than, his relations with 
nature. He is primarily a nature poet, and 
a peculiar and interesting one. The " land- 
scape " of no English poet has been more 
normally English than his, and few have 
covered such a range. Most landscape poetry 
deals with certain special kinds of times and 
places, dawn, twilight or sunset, mountains, 
bleak moorlands, ripe cornfields, seas very 
rough or very blue, summer more than winter, 
willows more than oaks, strong sunlight or 
strong moonlight more than the diffused 
light of an ordinary overclouded day. This is 
easily explicable. Scenes very definitely 
coloured, forms obviously decorative, seasons 
which make a violent appeal to our senses, 
shapes and shades by their nature and by 
tradition indissolubly associated with our uni- 
versal elementary thoughts and states of 
feeling, will inevitably be those most commonly 
recalled and described. Moreover, many 
writers have their own dominant and habitual 
preferences from amongst these; the exhilar- 
ating dawns of Wordsworth, the bright, still 
sunshine of Keats, the large moons and lament- 
ing beaches of Tennyson come automatically 

[38] 



EDWARD THOMAS 

into the mind with the mention of their names. 
Edward Thomas was unusual in avoiding the 
usual. Not only did he not go to nature 
mostly for decoration or for a material setting 
for his moods, but he did not select, uncon- 
sciously or deliberately, his subjects. Except 
that he avoided large towns and the conven- 
tionally romantic, one may fairly say that he 
was liable to write a poem about anything 
one might see at any time of day in a walk 
across the South of England. He was not 
haunted by the rare unusual things, the one 
glorious night of a year, the perfect twilight 
on a lake, the remembered sunset over the 
marshes, which will haunt most of us. He 
was moved by and wrote about the things we 
pass daily and could look at properly if we 
cared to; he was like one of those simple and 
charming water-colour painters who will sit 
down in front of anything, any ditch, haystack, 
or five-barred gate, and get the essential 
into a sketch. White winter sunlight; rain 
on wild parsley; hawthorn hanging over a 
reedy pond with a moorhen swimming across it; 
spring snow and rooks in the bare trees; 
a gamekeeper's gibbet; the head-brass of a 
ploughman's team; peewits at nightfall; hounds 
streaming over a hedge; a February day, thin 

[39] 



LIFE AND LETTERS 

sunlight on frozen mud and three cart-horses 
looking over a gate; old labourers going home 
— these are the things he wrote about, and 
many such trifles many times repeated are the 
English countryside as it is and as it has 
been. His earth is not merely something brown 
that goes with the blue at one particular 
moment or is dark against the sunset at 
another; it is earth, now dusty, now wet and 
clogged, which is ploughed and takes its seed 
and brings forth corn in due season. He is as 
close to it at one time as at another; the depths 
of his heart can be sounded by the dint of a 
hobnail on a path's mud; and he wants no 
flamboyant sunsets who can find all the beauty 
and mystery of colour in the curling white and 
gold and purple fronds of a pile of swedes. 

Any of these poems might be quoted; I 
will take as an example one of the least 
conspicuous, a poem less musical than many 
of them and only indirectly revealing his 
temperament, one that illustrates scarcely 
any of his qualities save the closeness of his 
obeservation and the use he made of the 
ordinary. It is The Path: 

Running along a bank, a parapet 
That saves from the precipitous wood below 
The level road, there is a path. It serves 
Children for looking down the long smooth steep, 

[40] 



EDWARD THOMAS 

Between the legs of beech and yew, to where 

A fallen tree checks the sight; while men and women 

Content themselves with the road and what they see. 

Over the bank, and what the children tell. 

The path, winding like silver, trickles on. 

Bordered and even invaded by thinnest moss 

That tries to cover roots and crumbling chalk 

With gold, olive and emerald, but in vain. 

The children wear it. They have flattened the bank 

On top, and silvered it between the moss 

With the current of their feet, year after year. 

But the road is houseless, and leads not to school. 

To see a child is rare there, and the eye 

Has but the road, the wood that overhangs 

And undergrows it, and the path that looks 

As if it led to some legendary 

Or fancied place where men have wished to go 

And stay; till sudden, it ends where the wood ends. 

This wood is anywhere and everywhere; we 
see it continually and take no notice of it; 
but I think that this poem would mean more 
than most to an exile in Rhodesia or the 
Soudan. You get another completely common- 
place scene — the country station — in Adle- 
strop! 

Yes. I remember Adlestrop — 

The name, because one afternoon 

Of heat the express-train drew up there 

Unwontedly. It was late June. 

The steam hissed. Someone cleared his throat. 

No one left and no one came 

On the bare platform. What I saw 

Was Adlestrop — only the name. 

[41] 



LIFE AND LETTERS 

And willows, willow-herb and grass. 
And meadows sweet and haycocks dry, 
No whit less still and lonely fair 
Than the high cloudlets in the sky. 

And for that minute a blackbird sang 
Close by, and round him, mistier. 
Farther and farther, all the birds. 
Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire. 

And almost more typical still is Tall Nettles: 
the corner in a farmyard, with a rusty harrow 
and a stone roller overgrown by nettles covered 
with dust, except after a shower. 

Where, here and there, the poet is more 
intimate and gives direct expression to his 
feelings, he uniformly reaches his highest 
level of poetry. The best, The Bridge and 
Lights Out, would be ruined by quotation; 
there are others, such as As pens , where, stand- 
ing at crossroads, outside a smithy, an inn 
and a shop, he listens to the trees talking of 
rain, and gives the last word on his prevalent 
mood: 

Whatever wind blows, while they and I have leaves 
We cannot other than an aspen be 
That ceaselessly, unreasonably grieves, 
Or so men think who like a different tree. 

There are one or two poems which touch on 
the war; the war as a distant and invisible 

[42] 



EDWARD THOMAS 

horror subtly troubling the most secluded 
English fields. The references are brief; his 
own destiny has made them doubly poignant. 
But one fancies that dying he may have known 
that he had left behind him, in the fruits of 
his recovered youth, work that will make him 
a known and living man to at least a few in all 
succeeding generations of Englislimen. 



[43] 



THE WALLET OF KAI-LUNG. 

Everybody knows about Mr. Thomas 
Hardy, Shakespeare, Lord Byron and Lord 
Tennyson. This does not detract from one's 
enjoyment of their works; but there is a 
peculiar and intense delight in good books 
which are not commonly known. English lit- 
erature is sprinkled with them, and one's own 
favourites of the kind one talks about with a 
peculiar enthusiasm. For myself I continually 
urge people to read Trelawney's Adventures of 
a Younger Son and Coryafs Crudities, which, 
famous enough in the auction room, is seldom 
enough talked about outside it. The present 
age, like other ages, produces these books that 
are less celebrated than they ought to be, and 
one of them is Mr. Ernest Bramah's The 
Wallet of Kai-Lung. This work was first 
published by Mr. Grant Richards in the year 
1900. For all I know to the contrary, it fell 
quite flat ; at any rate since that date Mr. Belloc 
has frequently informed an inattentive public 
that it is one of the best of modern books, but 

[44] 



THE WALLET OF KALLUNG 

one has never heard it mentioned by any other 
critic. Largely, I take it, on account of Mr. 
Belloc's recommendation, Methuens have now 
issued it in their Is. 3d Library. It is a volume 
of Chinese stories. 

One does not need to have read many trans- 
lations from the Chinese to understand that 
there is a distinctive, a unique, Chinese way 
of looking at things. The late Count Hayashi, 
m his memoirs, observed that his own country- 
men, whatever their material successes, could 
not help feeling inferior in the presence of the 
civilisation, the rounded philosophy and per- 
fect manners, of the Chinese gentleman. A 
man who reads Chinese poetry is in contact 
with a mastery of the Art of Life. Religion 
does not come in much except for rather 
decorative gods and good spirits and demons; 
once admit religion in our sense and the 
Chinese conception of life will not hold water. 
But granted their rationalistic epicureanism 
they certainly carry it out to perfection. 
They keep so superbly their balance. Moved 
by the passions, they stand outside themselves 
and watch themselves with sympathetic 
humour. They would have grief but not its 
abandonment, joy but not its paroxysms; 
they are conscious of the sweet in the bitter 



LIFE AND LETTERS 

and the bitter in the sweet. They bear pain, 
and the spectacle of pain, with equanimity; 
yet their calm does not degenerate into callous- 
ness, and their comments on the spectacle of 
life fall through the air like parti-coloured 
petals, which flutter noiselessly in the wind and 
show in constant alternation the grey side of 
irony and the golden side of tenderness. 
They enjoy beautiful things with an exquisite 
sensibility, but a careful moderation: wine, 
flowers, and the sky, snow upon the moun- 
tains, reflections in the water, song and the 
laughter of girls. They yield a little to every- 
thing, but surrender to nothing, save to death; 
and there they submit courteously, with 
dignity, and throwing back a glance of no 
more than whimsical regret. The old Chinese 
literature is steeped in this philosophy. They 
have, it is alleged, no literature now on a 
higher level than that which comes out on 
the tea-boxes. But the manners and the 
restraint remain. When the fall of the Pekin 
Legations was in doubt the then Chinese 
Minister here, a most enlightened and charm- 
ing man, was asked what would happen to 
the diplomatists if the rebels got in. " They 
will be decahpitated," he said, with a slight 
inclination. " But what will happen to the 

[46] 



THE WALLET OF KAI-LUNG 

women and children? " continued the lady. 
" They will be decahpitated," he said. " But 
you, who are so pro-English, what would 
happen to you if you were there? " " I should 
be decahpitated." He thought that adequate: 
it was only decorous to leave any anxieties or 
strong emotions he had to be guessed. 

Mr. Bramah, in his book, has got the Chinese 
equanimity wonderfully; the most moving 
and the most horrible things are told with 
mild deprecation; the most grotesquely farci- 
cal situations are analysed and developed with 
a full sense of their rich ludicrousness but with 
the very slightest loss of gravity on the part 
of the narrator. All the characters behave 
consistently, veiling their actions and their 
intentions behind the most transparent lies and 
subterfuges and saying the most offensive 
things in the politest possible way. For it is 
to the comic side of the Chinese genius 



that Mr. Bramah chiefly inclines. Now and 
then he uses China as an illustration of Europe. 
By transplanting customs and phrases he at 
once suggests the unity and the absurdity of 
mankind. In The Confession of Kai-Lung 
he is frankly preposterous. He describes 
Kai-Lung's early career as an author in terms 
precisely applicable to a European literary 

[47] 



LIFE AND LETTERS 

failure. He began by falling in love with Tiao 
T'sun, the most beautiful maiden in Pekin, 
whom he frequently met 

" at flower-feasts, melon-seed assemblies, and 
those gatherings where persons of both sexes 
exhibit themselves in revolving attitudes, and 
are permitted to embrace openly without 
reproach " 

(which reminds one of the old lady's comment 
on the Tango, in one of the late " Saki's " 
books : " I suppose it doesn't matter if they 
really love one another"). Kai-Lung was 
successful in his suit. Then, " on a certain 
evening," he says: 

" this person stood alone with Tiao upon an 
eminence overlooking the city and watched 
the great sky-lantern rise from behind the 
hills. Under these delicate and ennobling 
influences he gave speech to many very orna- 
mental and refined thoughts which arose 
within his mind concerning the graceful bril- 
liance of the light which was cast all around, 
yet notwithstanding which a still more excep- 
tional light was shining in his own internal 
organs by reason of the nearness of an even 
purer and more engaging orb. There was no 

[48] 



THE WALLET OF KAI-LUNG 

need, this person felt, to hide even his most 
inside thoughts from the dignified and sym- 
pathetic being at his side, so without hesitation 
he spoke — in what he believes even now must 
have been a very decorative manner — of the 
many thousand persons who were then wrapped 
in sleep, of the constantly changing lights 
.which appeared in the city beneath, and of 
the vastness which everywhere lay around. 

" ' O Kai-Lung,' exclaimed the lovely Tiao, 
when this person had made an end of speaking, 
' how expertly and in what a proficient manner 
do you express yourself, uttering even the 
sentiments which this person has felt inwardly, 
but for which she has no words. Why, indeed, 
do you not inscribe them in a book? ' " 

He does. But while he is absorbed in his 
labour Tiao accepts " the wedding gifts of an 
objectionable and excessively round-bodied 
'individual, who had amassed an inconceivable 
number of taels by inducing persons to take 
part in what at first sight appeared to be an 
ingenious but very easy competition connected 
with the order in which certain horses should 
arrive at a given and clearly defined spot." 
'He completes his work, publishes it at great 
expense and great loss, and makes a last 

[49] 



LIFE AND LETTERS 

desperate bid with an effort to prove that the 
works of the great national poet were not sheer 
imitations. Here, in adaptations from Shakes- 
speare, we lapse into burlesque. There are 
several quotations like; " O nobly intentioned 
but nevertheless exceedingly morose Tung- 
shin, the object before you is your distinguished 
and evilly-disposed-of father's honourably- 
inspired demon " — though after all a Boer 
dramatic adapter did render the same passage 
as " I am thy papa's spook." This excursion, 
however, does show Mr. Bramah's style. 
That style is almost impeccable. 

He keeps it up from start to finish; cere- 
monial to the point of absurdity, embellished 
with an unending flow of maxim and euphem- 
ism. It is not possible here to detail the com- 
plicated plots of his extremely ingenious' 
stories. The best of all is The Transmutation 
of Ling. Ling is a studious youth who passes 
the public examination and, to his horror, is 
awarded, not a cosy nook in the Whitehall of 
Pekin, but the command of a very white-livered 
band of bowmen who have to resist the contin- 
ual onslaughts of exceedingly ferocious bandits. 
His adventurers are numerous and diverse. As 
I say, I will not tell the story, which Kai-Lung 
recounts, standing with a rope around his neck 
[so] 



THE WALLET OF KAI-LUNG 

and his toes touching the ground, to a brigand 
chief with a formidable snickersnee. But one 
may perhaps quote some of the incidental 
proverbs, which add much to the grace of the 
tales. 

" Before hastening to secure a possible reward 
of five taels by dragging an unobservant person 
away from a falling building, examine well his 
features lest you find, when too late, that it 
is one to whom you are indebted for double 
that amount." 

" The road to eminence lies through the cheap 
and exceedingly uninviting eating-houses." 

" Although there exist many thousand subjects 
for elegant conversation, there are persons 
who cannot meet a cripple without talking 
about feet." 

Whether Mr. Ernest Bramah has been to the 
East or has merely caught the atmosphere of 
its literature I do not know. I have only 
recently learnt who he is. But it is not 
surprising that one who likes good satire, good 
humour, good romance and good English 
should find the book worthy of being an insep- 
arable companion. 

[51] 



ONE 

Lovely and pleasant it is to have lynxes 
for readers. A little while ago I referred to 
a verbal solecism of which the authors of the 
King's English — the most salutary and divert- 
ing of all works on composition — would not 
allow the use. A reader, whose title to speak 
is fully equal to that of those authors, at once 
wrote to say that I need not think that I 
avoided ugly and indefensible English alto- 
gether. I am, he says, deep -sunk in one vice 
which would certainly have been denounced 
by the authors of the King's English had it 
been as prevalent when they wrote as it is now. 
This is the habit of using " One " in contexts 
where it cannot pretend to represent anything 
but " I " or " me." He appends illustrative 
extracts: Four from Oneself, one from Mr. 
P. F. Warner, one from the Bishop of the 
Falkland Islands, and three from persons 
unknown — one of whom writes : " But I have 
known in the small circle of one's personal 



ONE 

friends quite a number of Jews who . . ." 
Guilty! 

The letter found one in a state in which 
one's defences are at their weakest. One was 
(and is) in bed with this loathly influenza, 
which has just shown its lack of discrimination 
elsewhere by killing the harmless Sultan of 
Turkey and sparing the Kaiser. One's head 
aches. One's spine aches. One's hip-bones 
and shoulder-blades ache and protrude. Count- 
less little sharp coughs harry one's outworn 
stomach. One's throat is a dry stove-pipe. 
One's brows are tight and one's eyelids heavy 
with the pressure of one's hot blood. One 
has no taste for tobacco; one cannot talk, 
work, think, or drink. All one can do is 
to shut one's eyes until one is bored with 
that, and then read until one is exhausted by 
that. 

I, I, I, I, I have, therefore, taken that 
course. My reading, as always in these cir- 
cumstances, has been the Bacon-Shakespeare 
controversy; when I am very ill indeed I think 

f there may be something in it. For two days 
I went from volume to volume, and at last I 
reached Sir Sidney Lee's Life of Shakespeare. 

\ This is, as is generally admitted, a prodigiously 
informative book, though its title might more 

[53] 



LIFE AND LETTERS 

accurately have been The Probable Life of 
Shakespeare. 

The perhapses drape the book in festoons 
right up to the hypothetical last malady which 
Sir Sidney introduces in these touching words: 

" The cause of Shakespeare's death is un- 
determined. Chapel Lane, which ran beside 
his house, was known as a noisome resort of 
straying pigs; and the insanitary atmosphere 
is likely to have prejudiced the failing health 
of a neighbouring resident." 

But it is a great book. It is an encyclo- 
paedia; its compiler has written with great 
learning, judgment, and fairness of mind; 
it is not likely to be superseded unless the 
Baconians suddenly prove their case. But 
(I observed on my couch) Sir Sidney has his 
defects as a writer. His ordinary style, com- 
pressed and clear, is wonderfully suited to the 
narration of dry facts. But when he feels he 
must be picturesque for a time or two, 
especially when he is attempting a little of that 
" merely aesthetic criticism " which he eschews 
in his preface, he is apt to be awkward with his 
imagery. Especially, he juxtaposes incon- 
gruous metaphors which, although moribund, 

[54] 



ONE 

are not quite dead enough to be put together 
unnoticed. When he writes of " all the 
features of a full-fledged tragi-comedy," one 
[I] cannot help wondering whether " features " 
was a misprint for " feathers." I was wonder- 
ing how it was that so sensible and unrhetorical 
a man as Sir Sidney had left these sentences 
in this book after so many editions, when the 
letter arrived informing me, in the pleasantest 
way, that I had a beam in my own eye. 

But, to continue our metaphors, my withers 
are unwrung by that beam. I know that I 
write " one " when " one " does not mean 
" we," or " everybody," or " any sort of 
person," but " I," or " me," and nothing 
else. One does not think one uses " I " and 
"one" in a single sentence; beyond that one 
is quite unscrupulous. One will say, for 
instance, " One opened this book with pleasure," 
which means, and can only mean, " / opened 
this book . . ." It is, from my critic's point 
of view, indefensible and inexplicable. Why 
do I do it? Or, rather, why do we do it? — 
for I am speaking now, not only for myself 
but for Mr. Pelham Warner and the Bishop of 
the Falkland Islands. The answer is simple. 
Reader, one is modest; bashful. 

I — for here I will force myself boldly into 

[JS] 



LIFE AND LETTERS 

the first personal pronoun — do not like seeing 
a page of print covered all over with I's. 
Those I's are so bold, so brazen; they stand 
up so, they are so tall. Often and often I 
suppress an " I " as I write, substituting the 
meaningless, but oh so comfortable and pseudo- 
nymous-looking, " One." Sometimes, owing 
to long custom, the operation is performed 
unconsciously. And often it is done deliber- 
ately after I have written. The proofs come 
back to one — here I am, lapsing again — and 
one is struck by the ubiquity of those little 
staring marks of egoism. Panic seizes one. 
" One " offers cover, and one takes it. 

There is the negative advantage; one would 
be a hypocrite if I were to pretend that one 
finds in the practice no positive advantage for 
myself. If a critic writes, " I admit that I 
did not approach this biography with a favour- 
able bias, but it was worse than I expected," 
he is liable to an uneasy feeling when he reads 
his own words. All these people, he will 
reflect, may say to themselves, " What the 
devil are your biases to do with us, and as for 
your opinion, it is only your opinion." But 
knock out the first person and put "one"; 
and forthwith the whole statement seems to 
acquire the mysterious backing of all man- 

[56] 



ONE 

kind. The critic's judgment looks like the 
inevitable judgment that any sane man was 
bound to form, that masses of men have simul- 
taneously formed; there is weight, authority, 
behind it, something of the weight and au- 
thority of the royal, papal, or editorial " we." 
That is not a defence; it is an explanation 
and a very discreditable admission. I admit 
that no really courageous or honest man 
(always excepting Mr. Pelham Warner and 
the Bishop of the Falkland Islands) would 
employ so ungainly a device to secure such 
dubious ends. As I have now confessed, 
I suppose that it would be futile to try it in 
these papers any more; my unobtrusiveness 
will no longer deceive. But if, in the future, 
it should be found that my works are covered 
with what I have heard another shy writer 
describe as " these horrible little telegraph- 
poles," do not blame me. The responsibility 
for the change, I hope I have made clear, rests 
elsewhere. 



[57] 



ANATOLE FRANCE 

Mr. Lane's English translation of Anatole 
France has been appearing for a good many 
years and there are still volumes to come. The 
latest is The Amethyst Ring, translated by 
Miss B. Drillien so perfectly that I shall seldom 
want to look at the French text again. The 
book is short. M. Bergeret, the Latin Professor 
and Antiquary (all M. France's heroes are 
antiquaries), comes in very little, and then as a 
sort of chorus. The plot is a slight one and 
deals with a young Jew millionaire's plot to 
get an abbe made into a bishop in return for 
the abbe getting him an invitation to join the 
aristocratic Due de Brece's hunt. Involved 
with this are several of the rather libidinous 
love-affairs in which M. France (who, though 
he cannot always be consistent in his negation 
of morality, is always securely non-moral here) 
delights, and a great deal of discussion of 
the Dreyfus affair. The love-affairs are of 
the usual type, purely animal. Young, rich 
men, selfish, and frequently surly, carry on 

[58] 



ANATOLE FRANCE 

surreptitious intrigues with married women, 
whom they meet for a few hours at a time 
in hired apartments. Details of furniture and 
hght, flesh, and hnen are described with a per- 
fect skill that almost makes the author's goat- 
ishness tolerable; but the more we have read 
of M. France's amorous interiors the staler they 
grow, as they are all so much alike, and we 
become violently conscious of his obsession. But 
his outlook on politics is much broader, and his 
description of the Dreyfus affair is, with all 
the limitations presently to be indicated, a his- 
torical document. We get the two sides to the 
discussion in a normal provincial town: one 
side taken by a few intellectual professors who 
; feel that the Army and the Church ought not 
I to be allowed to convict an innocent man on 
general grounds; the other taken by the 
! ecclesiastics and gentry, who bother very little 
about the details as to Dreyfus, but think that 
it is horrible to question the verdict of an Army 
j Court and are, anyhow, convinced that the Jews 
j are eatmg mto the vitals of contemporary 
I France. No book ever written was more 
easy to read, but this is not owing to the 
author's contribution to the Dreyfus discussion 
or to his capacity for doing more than skim 
the surface (though he does that with mar- 

[S9] 



LIFE AND LETTERS 

vellous justice anl humour) of the opposed 
cases. 

What we like is what we always like in 
M. France: the sly digs at everybody, the 
kindly insight into human foibles, the brief 
delicious pictures of town and country, church 
and castle, and the affectionate discourses on 
antiquities of every sort, religious and ceramic, 
architectural and armorial. The evidences 
of M. France's promiscuous learning and 
catholic taste are sprinkled on every page. It 
would be impossible to find descriptions more 
vivid, more certain in their atmosphere, and in 
their indications of the differences made by the 
contributions of various ages, than M. France's 
descriptions of the castles of Brece and Montil. 
He has an almost physical feeling for the old 
stones, the plate-armour, the helmets, and the 
weapons, the books behind their netting in high, 
old libraries, the corridors, and staircases, the 
marble mantelpieces, and bronze lamps, iron 
and brass. He is the most versatile and de- 
licious connoisseur on record. But as for the 
rest — well, INI. Bergeret, asked whether truth 
would prevail, said, " It is precisely what I, 
personally, do not think,'* and proceeds to ex- 
plain that falsehood is at once more powerful 
and more amusing than truth. Thus speaking, 

[60] 



ANATOLE FRANCE 

he took the attitude which, though it may not 
have been natural to M. France, has become 
second nature to him. 

For M. France has the defects of his qual- 
ities. He is a connoisseur, an antiquary, a sen- 
timentalist; but he is a man of the world only 
in the more limited sense of the word. If he 
encountered a great living movement his 
attitude towards it would be, whether for 
rational reasons he gave it support or not, 
much the same as that of Pontius Pilate in his 
own story. The background of his life is 
the background of the essay in The Garden 
of Epicurus: an immense cold universe, full 
of millions of stars greater than this world, 
and themselves perhaps part of a system which 
is a molecule in some other system; and, save 
for specks of matter, and of life, which is an 
iridescent gleam on the surface of that matter 
(or, as M. Bergeret in a pessimistic moment 
put it, part of a process of physical decay), it 
is all void. He thinks the chance of immor- 
tality is about equal to the chance of a man 
named Jones living in any house arbitrarily 
selected in any street: and apparently he 
regards the chance in either case with equal 
indifference. He is not blind to enthusiasms; 
but he looks down on the enthusiast as a person 

[6i] 



LIFE AND LETTERS 

behaving in a quaint and rather pathetic 
manner. A " charming " manner, in fact. 

Anatole France finds ahnost everything 
charming, from Tacitus to St. Pierre and from 
the simple devotion of a girl communicant 
to the fetichism of Africa — to which he some- 
where refers as " that charming faith." All 
the past, all the remains of all the civilisations, 
all the causes for which men have lived and 
died, all ancient vagaries of custom, art, and 
belief, they are all " charming " and they all 
go into his mental cabinet. His perceptions 
are most delicate; his sympathy is wide and 
ready enough to enable him to allow its little 
due of tenderness to every human suffering 
and aspiration and joy, its little tribute of easy 
tears to every soft landscape and every 
forlorn relic of old endeavour, its little meed 
of admiration to every heroic effort. But 
all, all seem small to him and all are in danger 
of that fatal epithet so suitable to the pastorals 
of Watteau and the engravings of Eisen, but, 
however effective at first sight, so misplaced 
and inadequate when applied to the deep 
realities of life. He can, in his own colours, 
recreate the past; he is learned in it, and he 
has an affection for it. But he deals with the 
present as he deals with the past, looking at 

[62] 



ANATOLE FRANCE 

it from above, with an ironic tenderness and 
a tender irony. Sometimes, since the living 
are alive and kicking as the dead are not, he 
finds that his puppets hit back at him; he 
cannot (being human) like that, and he has 
not yet sufficiently recovered his balance to 
find the French Symbolists charming. But 
even if he did he would emotionally miss, though 
he might intellectually apprehend, the essential 
in them, just as in this book he misses the 
essential in the best of the Anti-Dreyfusards. 
He is fair as far as he can be. He no more pal- 
liates the corruption of financiers and politicians 
(though he overlooks the ridiculousness of 
rationalists) than he does the stupidity and 
bigotry of soldiers, priests, and the old noblesse. 
But he exhibits them all with a softening veil 
before them. What they do little matters; the 
bestiality of the intriguers and the brutes, the 
burning idealism of those who on the one side 
thought an innocent man was being persecuted 
and on the other side felt that France was 
being befouled by a crowd of rotten politicians 
and gross and greedy international Jews, alike 
escape him. He dislikes both injustice and 
vulgarity; but dislike is as strong a word as 
one can use. 

He hates nothing: not even the Catholic 

[63] 



LIFE AND LETTERS 

Church, which, indeed, has had a lifelong 
fascination for him, although he classes Chris- 
tianity with the cults of the Ibos and Ojibways 
and below those of the Greeks. He can see 
hate; he knows what it is like in other people; 
he has been tinged with its emanations; but 
he has not felt it. He thinks it, unless it 
is uncomfortably close, charming; if it is 
close he refuses to see it as it is. It is one thing 
to write of the past as if it were the present; 
it is another thing to write of the present 
as if it were the past, and that is what Anatole 
France has done. He is a connoisseur first 
and a man afterwards: taste and wit are for 
him substitutes for morality and religion. 
All things are trivial and if they are not 
already charming, time will soon make them so. 
But the man who finds passion charming has 
never felt it; the man who finds anger charm- 
ing has never known it; and the man who finds 
death charming has never feared it. The 
philosophy which has dominated Anatole 
France has made him, with some deliberation, 
seal the springs of enthusiasm, of love, and of 
worship. He feels himself larger than life 
but he is not. The result is that he has never 
become the novelist he might have been, a 
novelist like Dickens or Balzac. If he lives, 

[64] 



ANATOLE FRANCE 

as I think he will live, he will live as a maker 
of bijouterie, a craftsman, a witty and dainty- 
essayist. In his kind he is a perfect artist; 
that one complains of him is a tribute to his 
unexploited power^. 



[65] 



NATURAL WRITING 

Some time ago I wrote an article on George 
Meredith which " eHcited " (gentle Jew, I 
thank thee for that word) an enormous mass of 
correspondence. It will, or rather (if I may 
assume an un journalistic candour) it will not, 
be remembered that I then explained my 
aversion to much in the character and writings 
of that great man. My " peg " was a book 
published by one of George Meredith's relatives 
and containing certain sidelights on his life. I 
did not really base my objection to Meredith on 
facts " disclosed " by his biographer ; it was 
more general and deep-seated; it was an 
objection which had its roots in a feeling that 
in his life and in his writings he was so artificial 
that one could not discover the real man. In 
the course of what I hope I may call my argu- 
ment I complained about the strained tortu- 
osities and insincerities of his writing. It 
was on this complaint that the only corre- 
spondent who disagreed with my article 
fastened: for most of them wrote emotionally 
[66] 



NATURAL WRITING 

to say that with this key I had unlocked their 
hearts, that they had always felt a sort of 
a something about Meredith which they had 
been unable to define, or that they had always 
disliked him and never had the courage to 
say so. 

My correspondent says: "If you object to 
Meredith's language, how can you tolerate 
that of Henry James? Why should not a man 
write as he likes if he has something to say?" 
Well, I am prepared to face the first question 
directly. I don't worship any writer for his 
faults, and I don't think that James, especially 
the later James, wrote the sort of English that 
I should like to see repeated. His sentences 
twisted and sprawled, his metaphors clustered 
and clung, until it was often necessary to read 
his sentences several times over to make 
certain of his meaning. Yet his obscurity 
and discursiveness seem to me very different 
from those of Meredith. James did not, as a 
rule, use far-fetched words, or drag in meta- 
phors for their own sakes, or elongate sentences 
in order to produce the effect of a firework 
display. He was far more likely to use slang 
words and to tangle his sentences with " as 
they say," " so to speak," and " at least in 
so far as," which are ordinary of the ordinary. 

[67] 



LIFE AND LETTERS 

His obscurity was the direct fruit of his passion 
for precision, his complexity was the child of his 
desire for simplicity. He wanted to state 
everything accurately; he, therefore, intro- 
duced sub-clause after sub-clause for the sake 
of making what he thought necessary reserva- 
tions, and metaphor after metaphor sprang 
to his pen to convey just the shade of meaning 
that he wanted to express. In his later years 
it was his habit to dictate a typescript, to 
dictate a second from the first, and to dictate 
a third from the second. In each round or 
lap new qualifications and amplifications were, 
usually clumsily, crowded in, until there was 
a final draft overfull of detail and very difficult 
to read. But though his passion for precision 
might irritate some readers (Mr. H. G. Wells 
compared his efforts to those of a hippopotamus 
picking up a pea) who felt that such a degree 
of intellectual power ought not to be expended 
upon trifles, even they had to respect that 
power and the sincerity with which he used 
it: the hippopotamus is a big creature and 
this one was admirably painstaking. The 
one thing nobody ever suggested about James 
was that he was insincere or pretentious. 

Meredith, on the other hand, was led into 
obscurity by his desire to impress: he was 
[68] 



NATURAL WRITING 

only intermittently sincere, he liked to " show 
off," he overloaded his work with superfluous 
decoration which was often not even good 
decoration. His obscurities were like the 
abracadabras of the medicine man; jargon 
primarily intended to impress the uninitiated. 
I remember a man telling me that he had spent 
a day with Meredith and that the novelist, 
before lunch, had said to him, " Would you 
like to lave your hands?" Well, a man might 
say that facetiously; anybody might. But 
of Meredith it was characteristic. His cheap 
jewellery was sometimes very glittering, and 
it was mixed up with genuine gems. He had 
genius, intellect, and imagination, but he did 
not trust it. He was not so much afraid to be 
himself; he positively disliked to be himself; 
he wanted to be something more brilliant and 
mysterious, so he expended enormous energy 
in fabrication instead of being content with 
creation. He, who when he was natural, was 
great, usually refused to be. The ordinary 
I word passed through his mind and, either 
\ before or after it reached paper, he deleted it 
i and substituted the unusual, as a rule gaining 
literally nothing by the change. 

A man should write naturally. Men's 
( natures differ. It is natural to some, for 

[69] 



LIFE AND LETTERS 

one reason or another, to write parenthetically; 
it is natural to some to write metaphysically; 
it is natural to some (as it is to the illustrious 
author of Wanderings in Arabia Deserta) to 
use an outlandish compost of words. But 
whereas I never feel that Mr. Doughty is 
dragging in his extraordinary Saxon words 
to bewilder me or compel my admiration, with 
Meredith I usually feel that he is being 
self-consciously artificial. We cannot help 
our natures, our tastes, the bents of our 
minds; but we can at least be true to 
ourselves. 

We must be, when writing, as natural and 
as simple as our natures, given full play, will 
allow us to be. I must not be misunderstood 
to say that we should write precisely as we 
speak. It is not a good thing even to speak 
exactly as we speak. The M.P. who (Hansard 
and the newspaper put his orations a Httle 
straight) says, " Mr. Speaker, I rise to say, 
I mean I get up to announce that — er — if this 
Bill, this measure, gets through, passes — er — 
it is impossible to say what will happen. Sir, 
the country is well on the way to the road to 
ruin," is in a manner speaking naturally; but 
that is not the style one commends. The 
ordinary reviewer, if he wrote his criticisms 

[70] 



NATURAL WRITING 

precisely as he talks, would come out with 
passages like: 

" We are just about fed up to the teeth with 
stuff like Mr. Timms's novel. We don't mean 
it is absolute rot, as the chap has got some 
intelligence. But he is playing the fool pretty 
badly, and if he goes on like this God help him." 

But language may be what we call natural — 
that is to say may fail to make the reader feel 
that somebody is performing tricks in front of 
him — without being vulgar, and it may ring 
sincerely without being colloquial. Meredith, 
had he had to deliver the obvious kind of 
judgment recorded in that imaginary extract, 
would probably have begun with " Come we 
now to Mr. Timms, ambushed by all the 
sprites, an eye, distinctly, nay desperately, 
intelligent still gleaming darkly amid the 
weedy abysms of the sentimental brake. 
Icarus, one would say, rather, Daedalus, for that 
he, etc., etc.," and even after that he would 
have gone through it barbarously revising, 
knocking out " ambushed " in favour of 
" ambuscadoed " or even " embuscadoed," 
and dropping in adventitious tropes. Writing 
such as his is at its worst seems to me to have 
the vilest possible fault: it is "made up," it is 

[71] 



LIFE AND LETTERS 

heartless rococo. And if the same criteria 
that we apply to him are applied to others we 
shall find that all sorts of English writers 
stay in our net, and that writers of many 
different kinds slip through it. Contortions 
are not in themselves evidence of artificiality; 
and there is a kind of hollow simplicity and 
clarity which rings more false than anything 
in the world. For at bottom " the style is the 
man," and a style which, whatever its other 
merits or defects, annoys us by its air of arti- 
ficiality, is merely the mask of a man who does 
not really mean, or feel, what he says. Here I 
must introduce a qualification. Anyone who 
took the above remarks literally might get the 
false impression that I was suggesting that, 
provided two styles were equally free from 
pose, they are equally meritorious. This 
would be ridiculous, a man's style is adorned 
by all kinds of things; some most unaffected 
people have no ear; others have a mania for 
digressions; others have a small or inexact 
vocabulary; whole books have been and will be 
written about style. But I do lay it down as 
a postulate that a man should not deliberately 
festoon his work with insincere archaisms or 
unilluminating figures of speech, and that every 
man, in so far as it is consistent with saying 

[72] 



NATURAL WRITING 

just what he wants to say, should be as clear 
in his writing as possible. Even Meredith, I 
suspect, if he went into a public-house to get 
a drink, took care that the bar-man should be 
in no doubt as to what he wanted. 

This, however, is not the last word upon 
style, which includes many things. 



[73] 



SECRET HISTORY 

" We are the people of England who never 
have spoken yet," is the refrain of one of Mr. 
Chesterton's old songs, and the thesis of his 
Short History of England (published by 
Chatto and Windus), which may be destined to 
be the most useful of his many useful books. 
Mr. Chesterton does not pretend to be a scholar, 
and he would probably not be surprised if he 
were told that there were numbers of inaccura- 
cies in his book and numbers of important 
qualifications out of it. He will go a little too 
far sometimes for an antithesis, a joke, or a 
climax; and at some places in his history the 
learned may say, " This is all wrong." But 
what matters is that the general motive and 
arguments are all right. Mr. Chesterton has a 
knowledge of human nature, a love of his 
countrymen, a belief in democracy, and, in spite 
of his strong opinions, a regard for truth. 
These are not always among the virtues of 
historians, and historians frequently lack the 
convictions that men are not born on the earth 

[74] 



SECRET HISTORY 

for nothing (that is, that hfe is worth living) 
and that the test of a civihsation is the sort 
of life that the majority of its members live. 
Mr. Chesterton has those convictions and he 
refuses to accept the common delusion that 
a civilisation of 1900 must be higher than a 
civihsation of 1800, because 1900 is after 1800; 
be, on the whole, is compelled to plump for 
the brief zenith of the Middle Ages, as the best 
period of a bad lot in the history of the English 
people. It is not sentimental mediaevalism, 
and he is not blind either to the advantages we 
have over our mediaeval ancestors or to the still 
greater advantages we might have if we only 
decided to regenerate our society instead of 
fatalistically submitting to the operation of 
" economic forces " — which are usually other 
words for the unbridled greed or undirected 
energy of individual men whom we are, if we 
only care to, at complete liberty to control, 
silence, lock up, or smite hip and thigh. He 
looks at the past with the eyes of a decent man 
who maintains that men have souls and that 
they should be treated like Christians; and by 
that test he judges what has and what has 
not been done. 

Never losing sight of that he gallops at 
top speed thi'ough English history; he misses 

[75] 



LIFE AND LETTERS 

great spaces, but wherever his hoof touches it 
strikes out fire. Continually he tosses off a 
sentence, the product of a clear eye and an 
untainted heart, which will shatter the con- 
ventional reader's preconceptions. " The first 
half of English history," he says, " has been 
made quite unmeaning in the schools by the 
attempt to tell it without reference to that 
corporate Christendom in which it took part 
and pride." There is no need for commentary 
on this: it is simple truth. And it is equally 
true that we cannot understand the struggle 
between Henry II. and Becket unless we 
understand what the Church stood for as well 
as what the Plantagenet monarchy stood for. 
Becket did not lose favour and die merely in 
order that guilty clergymen should escape 
the proper reward of their crimes; and the 
situation cannot be rightly assessed unless we 
consider Henry's action in going to be flogged 
at Becket's tomb, and the popular reverence 
of Becket, together with the legal struggle that 
preceded the tragedy. The early legends 
— all our heroes, he notes, are anti-harharic — 
the Reformation, the Civil Wars and the 
Eighteenth Century are all treated, perhaps 
sketchily, but with a verisimilitude that 
convinces. At every point the orthodox nar- 

[76] 



SECRET HISTORY 

rators stand condemned; and everywhere they 
have failed to attempt to grasp the real 
mind of the masses of the people and even — 
if the period is distant enough — that of their 
governors. Nowhere is this more noticeable 
than in the common treatment of the Crusades. 
They were not fought for nothing. They were 
not fought for gain. They were not fought out 
of bigotry. There was good and evil mixed 
in them, but no wars in human history were 
fought for a better cause and none appealed 
more strongly to the souls of common men. 
No more, again, do our historians attempt to 
visuahse the great buildings of the Middle 
Ages, and what was behind them: they merely 
say they are there and give the Middle Ages 
one good mark for them. Opinions such as 
these Mr. Chesterton maintains with his usual 
wit and his usual eloquence; his jokes are 
seldom forced in this book, and in many places 
he rises into noble passages of English prose. 
He lets out with immense good humour and 
effect at pedants of all sorts, especially anthro- 
pologists and Teuto-mongers ; and he gives 
by the way character sketches, particularly 
two of Sir Thomas More and Richard III., 
which are both brilliant and plausible. And 
I he drives home an obvious truth when he 

[77] 



LIFE AND LETTERS 

accuses us of magnifying the defects of the 
Middle Ages by telescoping our chronicles. 
Certainly if a man were to write in eight pages 
a history of the last century, mentioning 
principally the wars and the sweating, he could 
make us out one of the basest generations on 
record. And that without falling back upon 
the ugliness of our civilisation and that mental 
plague, which, as Mr. Chesterton observes, has 
left us worshipping in children all that we have 
crushed out in men. 

The book is not a history. It is a historical 
essay. It covers two thousand years in three 
hundred pages, and the general propositions 
leave little room for the facts which might 
illustrate them. But it might well be used by 
a more laborious writer as the theoretical 
basis for a history on the grand scale. Every 
contention that Mr. Chesterton advances, 
every institution that he describes, every 
trend of sentiment that he detects, might be 
documented from ruins and records, charters 
and songs, traditions and laws. The " evi- 
dences " for such a work lie scattered in thou- 
sands of books, buildings and memories, not 
to speak of the minds of living men: the 
one place where you will never find them in 
large numbers is a formal history book. The 

[78] 



SECRET HISTORY 

manner of writing history has been subject to 
fashions. At first men compiled — and they 
were then, at least to some extent, in touch 
with humanity — very undiscriminating chron- 
icles in which, if battles received too much 
attention, at least they were battles and not 
merely episodes in economic development, 
and if legends received too generous an accept- 
ance, at least there was no assumption that you 
could understand men's deeds without under- 
standing their dreams. The scientific spirit 
grew and the development of institutions was 
given, quite properly, increased attention. 
The 1297 Parhament of Stow-in-the-Wold, the 
Charter of Chudleigh, the refusal of the Hemp 
Subsidy, and other such incidents became 
landmarks with whole pages to themselves. 
Anxious to know how the British Constitu- 
tion, in its widest sense, had reached its present 
condition, men catalogued ancient laws without 
really bothering about their origins and ob- 
jects, and stared hard at ancient offices with- 
out visualising the men who occupied them. 
Political economy came into existence, and 
more was said about exports, imports, the mer- 
cantile theory, the discovery of the Mexican 
silver mines, the trading companies, and the 
Enclosures Acts. Finally, it became a com- 

[79] 



LIFE AND LETTERS 

monplace amongst the enlightened that too 
little had been said about the " condition of 
the people " throughout history. Green wrote, 
with a laudable ambition, a work, the title 
of which recognised this. Paragraphs on the 
Black Death and the Peasants' Revolt began 
to be sprinkled with a few quotations from 
Langland; attempts were made at a sys- 
tematic study of our forefathers' wages; and 
the excursus on the manners and pastimes of 
the multitude became common form. But 
whatever the narrative fashion of the age, and 
whatever the idiosyncrasies of particular his- 
torians, the real history of the English people 
remains to be written. There have been his- 
torians who have treated their subjects in a 
human way, and who have avoided quite openly 
the dry pseudo-scientific method. One wrote 
to celebrate the greatness of Tudor England; 
another to celebrate the triumphs of Whiggery. 
They were entitled to their opinions and their 
heroes: but of none of them was the hero the 
English people, and none of them were pri- 
marily concerned with the opinions, the emotions 
and the experiences of the English people. Our 
histories are all histories of the crust: if kings 
and aristocrats are not the only people who 
matter, then politicians and intellectuals are 

[80] 



SECRET HISTORY 

the only people who matter. The masses may 
be completely disregarded or they may be re- 
garded with a measure, great or small, of sym- 
pathy: but when they are not forgotten they 
are, consciously or unconsciously, patronised, 
and openly or by implication denounced. 
Above all our history has been run in the in- 
terests of Industrialism, and where Progress 
has failed to be progressive historians have, 
often so naturally that they were unaware of 
it, blinded themselves to good things we have 
lost and the manner of our losing them. Eng- 
lish history is, in effect, a whitewashing of the 
fait accompli. 

Those are Mr. Chesterton's contentions, just 
as they were the contentions of Mr. Maurice 
Hewlett's fine agricultural epic The Song of 
the Plow, the history of which bears a close 
resemblance to Mr. Chesterton's. It doesn't 
matter whether he tells the whole truth or 
not; at any rate, he emphasises many truths 
commonly overlooked. And if he also has a 
log to roll it is, at any rate, a more important 
log than the others. He, like Mr. Hewlett, 
ends with the war and the transfiguration of 
the common disinherited man, called upon at 
last to confront the nation which above all 
others had been praised by his professors 

[8i] 



LIFE AND LETTERS 

and his politicians as a pioneer of civilisa- 
tion: 

" He in whose honour all has been said and 
sung stirred, and stepped across the border of 
Belgium. Then were spread out before men's 
eyes all the beauties of his culture and all the 
benefits of his organisation; then we beheld 
under a lifting daybreak what light we had 
followed and after what image we had laboured 
to refashion ourselves. Nor in any story of 
mankind has the irony of God chosen the 
foolish things so catastrophically to confound 
the wise. For the common crowd of poor and 
ignorant Englishmen, because they only knew 
that they were Englishmen, burst through the 
filthy cobwebs of four hundred years and stood 
where their fathers stood when they knew that 
they were Christian men. The English poor, 
broken by every revolt, bullied by every fashion, 
long despoiled of property, and now being 
despoiled of liberty, entered history with a 
noise of trumpets, and turned themselves in two 
years into one of the iron armies of the world. 
And when the critic of politics and literature, 
feeling that this war is after all heroic, looks 
around him to find the hero, he can point to 
nothing but a mob." 

[82] 



SECRET HISTORY 

This also the scientific materiahst will call 
rhetoric, and look for his explanations else- 
where, not seeing, or blind to their beauty if 
he does see them, the multitudinous idealisms 
and loves and loyalties in the host of inarticulate 
breasts whose only speech is action — and a 
misleading jest. But there is truth in the 
rhetoric, and the truth will be told about no 
large movement of humanity unless the imagi- 
nation and the emotions are brought to bear 
upon the facts. Wat Tyler's followers, usually 
described as " a peasantry resentful of an un- 
just poll-tax," cannot be comprehended by 
that phrase; a whole novel would not be too 
long to display the confused minds of those 
resentful and then briefly exhilarated men who, 
I though illiterate and no doubt incapable of 
J formulating a system which would establish and 
secure what they wanted, had a Utopia of a 
sort in their hearts and knew what they immedi- 
ately wanted, and that in justice they should 
have it, and were prepared to risk their lives 
that their class might have it. Mr. Chesterton's 
l. short passage on the Pilgrimage of Grace lets 
far more light in on the state of mind behind 
that rebellion than any amount of " facts " 
about it backed by lifeless references to " those 
whose sympathies still clung to the old regime." 

[83] 



LIFE AND LETTERS 

But one might come nearer. I happen to re- 
member the 1906 election and the campaign in 
the rural constituencies of which I saw a good, 
deal. A great and successful appeal was made 
to the agricultural labourer. The outcome of it 
was a largely unworkable and unworked Small 
Holdings Act. The Act will get a few lines 
in the histories: the appeal will probably get 
none at all. Moreover few, even of the men 
who made that appeal, and dangled before the 
labourer the realisation of his age-long hope 
of work in liberty with a proper reward on the 
land which is in his bones, exercised their imagi- 
nations sufficiently to realise what the promise 
and the disappointment meant to him. For he 
does not write books, he is slow of speech, he 
can only vote, after all, for one side or the 
other, and — in the end — centuries of frustra- 
tion have made him resigned, and he is quite 
prepared, as often as necessary, to submerge 
his useless aspirations in a pint of beer. If the 
history of England still remains unwritten Mr. 
Chesterton's book may at least teach the next 
generation of historians their business. 



[84] 



MR. ASQUITH AS AUTHOR 

Excluding collections of political speeches, 
Mr. Asquith's Occasional Addresses, 1908-16, is 
his first book; unless, indeed, like most able 
young lawyers, he wrote something about Torts 
or Company Law in an earlier age. The book 
consists mainly of five considerable addresses : on 
Criticism, Biography, Ancient Universities and 
the Modern World, Culture and Character, and 
the Spade and the Pen — the last being con- 
cerned with classical studies and the place of 
archaeology. There are also lesser addresses 
on the English Bible, Omar Khayyam, and 
other subjects, a Latin speech made at Win- 
chester, and several obituary " tributes " to emi- 
nent men deceased. These last, perhaps, would 
not all have been included had Mr. Asquith not 
desired to give the public a respectable sized 
book for its money. 

But the smaller book would have been well 
worth it. No professional author has con- 
structed in our time so clear, so compressed, so 
convincing a defence of the humanities, and so 

[85] 



LIFE AND LETTERS 

eloquent a demonstration of their daily prac- 
tical value as Mr. Asquith has produced in the 
sporadic addresses of his restricted leisure. It 
is not to be supposed that he devotes himself 
entirely to generalisations as to " culture," ab- 
sorbed discursively, or under curriculum. Both 
his addresses to students and the others are full 
of incidental judgments upon books and men, 
criticisms usually indisputable, and often origi- 
nal. His criticisms of the literatures of the 
ancient world, as well as of English books of 
several centuries, would be well worth having if 
they illustrated no general argument at all. His 
tastes are, on the whole, orthodox; one deduces 
that he is most drawn to the admittedly great- 
est of writers. But though never eccentric, he 
thinks independently. The evidences of this 
are everywhere. One may quote his acute ob- 
servation that 

" if we were given fewer of a man's letters to 
his friends, and more of his friends' letters to 
him, we should get to know him better because, 
among other reasons, we should be better able 
to realise how his personality affected and 
appealed to others." 

One may quote also his illuminating pages on 
the neglected autobiography of Haydon, the 
[86] 



MR. ASQUITH AS AUTHOR 

painter; his description of Haydon as "one 
of the acutest and most accomplished critics 
of his time," and his question, though it be a 
mere question, why it was that Haydon was 
not a great portrait painter. We may note, 
incidentally, as lights on his tastes, that he is 
a close student of Bacon and a devotee of Sir 
Walter Scott, and that he believes most of 
Shakespeare's sonnets to have had no relation 
with the poet's personal career. I have not, 
however, space here to enter into such ques- 
tions of detail; and I must be content, as to 
Mr. Asquith's general views about culture, to 
refer readers to the book itself, and especially 
to the noble passages on pages 25 and 69. 
Nothing is more remarkable about these ad- 
dresses than the apparently effortless way in 
which their author " lifts " to a higher level of 
eloquence. He favours the sustained perora- 
tion; but his perorations grow out of, are all of 
a piece with, what has gone before, instead 
of being shamelessly stuck on like those of the 
wanton rhetorician. One result of this, how- 
ever, is that they are not detachable: one al- 
ways wants to take in the sentence before, so 
to speak. Instead of attempting to quote them, 
therefore, I may be permited to pass to 
a few remarks upon his way of express- 

[87] 



LIFE AND LETTERS 

ing himself: what, vaguely, we call his 
style. 

In his lecture on " Culture and Character," 
Mr. Asquith refers to the frequency with which 
" a man takes an hour to say what might have 
been as well or better said in twenty minutes, 
or spreads over twenty pages what could easily 
have been exhausted in ten." The offence of 
being " slipshod and prolix " is never com- 
mitted by him. There is no greater living mas- 
ter of the summary; and the qualities of his 
speaking are present in his writing. Lie sur- 
veys his field from a detached eminence, and 
sketches its main outlines with precision and in 
their due proportions. His survey is so simple 
and straightforward as sometimes to appear easy 
and obvious; but a man who should succumb 
to that impression might be recommended to 
attempt the operation for himself. The cer- 
tainty with which JMr. Asquith grasps his gen- 
eral ideas is matched by, and allied to, the 
lucidity with which he formulates them. No 
one, I might add, who was not habituated to 
accurate expression could, when occasion calls, 
say nothing at all with Mr. Asquith's ease and 
safety. His verbal instrument is the perfect 
servant of his mind. It is indeed difficult for 
a politician to retain a sound style. Whenever 
[88] 



MR. ASQUITH AS AUTHOR 

he rises he must play St. Anthony to beckon- 
ing hosts of cliches; and according to his tem- 
perament he will be more liable to yield to one 
^evy or the other, to those of wooden pomposity 
and sham dignity or to those of intemperate 
rhetoric and sham passion. Mr. Asquith, as 
a political speaker, has been known, not infre- 
quently, to lapse into a hollow resonance, and 
there are a few examples of this pardonable and 
almost unavoidable humbug in the obituary 
speeches printed at the end of this volume. But 
as a speaker — or, rather, a writer — on other 
subjects he is entirely free from it; and his style 
is literally a model of its kind. 

It is what is called a classical, what used to 
be called a "correct" style: the style natural 
to a man of his intellect and temper. His 
sentences are close-knit: packed, but easy. 
Every phrase adds something; but an intract- 
able content never destroys the balance. In 
the Latinity of the language, in the structure 
of the sentences, in the objectivity, imperson- 
ality, of the writer's attitude, there is something 
reminiscent of the eighteenth century. There 
are constant faint traces of Johnson, of Burke, 
of Gibbon. We observe the affectionate use 
of words like " denigration " and " fuliginous "; 
and admirably compendious phrases like that 

[89] 



LIFE AND LETTERS j 

in which, referring to the production of super- 
fluous biographies, he speaks of " the monu- 
ments which filial piety or misdirected friend- 
ship is constantly raising to those who deserved 
and probably desired to be forgotten." One 
has employed the word "affectionate"; and 
here, of course, is one of the places where per- 
sonality does come in. Marked proclivities in 
language are in themselves windows into per- 
sonality. And in these addresses Mr. Asquith's 
individuality peeps out in all sorts of ways: 
in the revelation of his tastes, in the warm 
mental glow which saves from frigidity the most 
" scientific " of his paragraphs, and in his fre- 
quent humour. But he does not write to display 
his powers of writing; he does not parade his 
tastes because they are his (announcing them 
merely because they appear to him to be sen- 
sible and reasonable) ; and he does not jump 
over the hedge for any joke or take even those 
which stand right in his road save in the most 
delicate and undemonstrative manner. Many 
readers, by no means obtuse, might well miss 
the gentle jest in his address to the Royal So- 
ciety, which was founded by Charles II.: 

" Whether the interest in anatomy displayed, 
as your annals show, by the Society in its 

[90] 



MR. ASQUITH AS AUTHOR 

earliest years was due to the proclivities of 
its Royal Patron, I do not know . . ." 

The passage on the uses of the bastinado and 
the knout in criticism might also be quoted; 
and the charming account of Jeremy Bentham's 
variegated evenings. His criticisms and apt 
images are all the more enjoyable because of 
their subservience to his main purpose: his 
refusal to allow the garlands to conceal the 
pillar. And one must mention his extraordi- 
narily happy and judicious use of quotations. 
They are never dragged in by the heels to dis- 
play learning or import a facile colouring; but 
the few he makes, both from English and from 
classical authors, are, by their very nature and 
pertinence, an unmistakable proof of large 
reserves. His temper, almost always, is ami- 
able. But just as the even surface of his lan- 
guage is sometimes abruptly and effectively 
broken by an unusual or a colloquial word, so 
his pervasive, easy tolerance now and then 
yields. Something hard comes into sight, like 
black rocks under a smooth sea; self-knowl- 
edge, determination, a settled, though usually 
concealed, contempt for the complacent stupid, 
and the pretentious superficial. But he never 
loses his self-control. 

[91] 



LIFE AND LETTERS 

It would be easy to supplement this brief 
catalogue of some of Mr. Asquith's qualities 
with a list of the qualities which he does not 
possess. He has little, no doubt, in common 
with Rousseau, Shelley, and John the Baptist; 
like the rest of us, he is something and not 
something else. But, reading this too slight 
collection, one remembers the superb general- 
isation that " conference maketh a ready man, 
reading a full man, and writing an exact man " ; 
and one feels that the three processes have here 
been operating, with uniform success, in one 
person. 



[92] 



THE INFINITIVES THAT 
WERE SPLIT 

To any writer, unless he be a morose hermit, 
it must be a pleasure to receive unsolicited let- 
ters from strangers. I myself — one must take 
one's illustrations from the nearest available 
source — receive such letters occasionally. They 
are as varied as possible. One correspondent, I 
remember, asked me what was my Christian 
name; another sent me a flower plucked on 
the slopes of Hymettus; another, having seen 
me complain that I had vainly tried for years 
to secure a copy of the Undertaker's Journal, 
obtained one from a parishioner, and forwarded 
it with a letter full of sinister charm. There 
are letters of congratulation, letters of abuse, 
letters seeking for knowledge, and letters (alas, 
too many!) pointing out ignorance. They all 
relieve the monotony of the post. All are wel- 
come; save only letters which deal with well- 
known and unobscure points of grammar. 

Two people write to me about a recent essay 
in this series. One says that it contained a 

[93] 



LIFE AND LETTERS 

SPLIT infinitive; the second that it contained 
TWO SPLIT INFINITIVES. The first 
says " I suppose you are one of those who de- 
fend split infinitives " ; the second assumes that 
no defence is possible. We can start, there- 
fore, with the fact clear that there are two sides 
and two parties to the question. There are some 
men who would no more split an infinitive than 
they would split their father's head with an axe, 
and who, when anybody else splits one, split 
their sides; there are others who, on occasion, 
will as cheerfully split an infinitive as a 
soda. 

Far be it from me to any longer than I am 
bound to dweU on a subject about which people 
are apt to so violently differ. But it is, I feel, 
my duty to briefly confess that there frequently 
are places in which splitting an infinitive secures 
an additional emphasis which could not be 
secured without the split, and places in which 
an infinitive that is not split makes one at once 
conscious that the author has tried to, at all 
costs, avoid a split infinitive with the result 
that his expression seems strained. 

I seldom split an infinitive. When I do I 
shall not feel called upon to explain why I do. 
But I am not content to leave the subject at 
that. For it has made me aware of something 

[94] 



SPLIT INFINITIVES 

about which, however generally it may be ex- 
perienced, I do not feel altogether easy. It 
has suddenly occurred to me that although I 
do not often perpetrate a spilt infinitive, I am 
often on the verge of doing so. I write down, 
in the first ardent flight of my fancy, some 
phrase like " to altogether condemn " or "to 
exactly express," and then I go back and alter 
it into " altogether to condemn " or " exactly 
to express." I now know that when I do this 
I do not do it because I think it right 
to do so, or because I think that in all 
cases the undivided, unseparated, indissolute, 
integral infinitive is the more elegant. I 
do it out of sheer cowardice. I am in 
fear of the pedants. I am (which is quite a 
good reason) bored by the prospect of getting 
letters asking for an explanation, and I am 
(which is not a good reason) cowardly afraid 
of seeming not to know that infinitives ought 
not to be split or not to have the taste, the ear, 
to detect one when I write it. And, realising 
this, I realise that there are all sorts of other 
alterations that I make in the same pusillani- 
mous and unnatural way. 

Is any of us natural? Is there one who in- 
rariably writes impeccable English at first go 
off? Is there one who, if he does not, has the 

[9S] 



LIFE AND LETTERS 

courage to let his first fine careless raptures 
stand? I doubt it. Since I first got fascinated 
by this topic I have asked five or six of the 
most scrupulous and respected writers of Eng- 
lish alive what is their practice. Accepting no 
evasions, I have discovered that every one of 
them habitually alters things after he has written 
them. I am not referring to alterations made 
for the sake of obvious improvement, strengthen- 
ing of epithet, or clarifications of phrase; I 
am referring merely to alterations which turn 
something colloquial and natural into something 
artificial and grammatical which will stand the 
scrutiny of the lynx-eyed gentlemen of leisure 
who seem to have nothing better to do than to 
look for specks in the suns of literature : errors, 
easy of commission, but indefensible by the 
rules. 

The split infinitive is only one thing in a 
large category. There is " that " and " which " 
and " who " ; they are continually being ex- 
changed because one or other of them, although 
the meaning is quite clear, looks a little wrong 
where it is put. There is " who " and " whom." 
How often have I, how often have Dickens, 
Wordsworth, JNIilton, and Shakespeare (Homer 
was a Greek, and so eluded the difiiculty) been 
bothered by the necessity of dealing rightly with 

[96] 



SPLIT INFINITIVES 

these preposterous pronouns, revising sentences 
in which they occur, saying to ourselves 
"Bother" (or, in the cases of Wordsworth 
and Milton, "Damn") "it all, is this the 
nominative after the verb ' to be,' or the accusa- 
tive after a transitive verb, or what else? " 
"Who did you see?" we (Shakespeare, etc.) 
write. The spectres of all the grammarians 
in the world rise before us as we write; we 
weakly go back and put an " m " after the 
"who"; an "m" which we may scatter indis- 
criminately about our conversation without 
knowing or caring whether we always have it 
in the right places. 

Some of us (Shakespeare and Milton, but 
not so much myself in this instance) write 
down " It is me," or " It was him." The same 
ghostly battalion emerges like vapour from the 
soil; the author looks uneasily over his shoulder 
and, with a twisted smile, substitutes "It is I " 
or " It was he." Accuracy has been secured 
at the cost of naturalness; Cerberus has had 
his sop ; the mouths of the pedants are stopped, 
and their tongues will not wag. There is an- 
other thing still worse: the obligation of " fol- 
lowing up " pronouns of alternative gender. 
You find you have to write, for example, 
a sentence such as 

[97] 



LIFE AND LETTERS 

" The story as told by Mr. (jMrs. or Miss) 
Jones does great credit to his, or her, powers 
of narration. He, or she, has a very flexible 
style; and his, or her, sense of humour is often 
considerably more in evidence than his, or her, 
respect of persons." 

That Is what you finally evolve. But your 
first impulse was ("their" having been re- 
jected as hopeless, since there is only one 
author) to write " his " all the way, and let the 
alternative " her " be understood. But you 
did not dare. You had not the courage. You 
were afraid that if you did, somebody would 
think you were slipshod, or somebody else would 
think you had not noticed that you had brought 
the feminine in at the beginning, or (worst of 
all) that somebody else would think you were 
unaware of the fact that you cannot use the 
masculine possessive of a feminine possessor. 
Your sentence, in its final and highly gram- 
matical form, is just as ugly and awkward as 
it would have been had you left it as it was. 
But your reputation for knowing all about the 
King's English is saved; and you feel that 
though they may call you foolish, dull, biased, 
tasteless, old-fashioned, decadent, or profligate, 
though they may suspect you of forging 

[98] 



SPLIT INFINITIVES 

cheques, of secret cannibalism, of garrotting, or 
of addiction to heroin or cocaine, they will at 
least not be able to direct against you the far 
more cutting and humiliating charge of being 
ungrammatical. 

Ought writers so to contort themselves (note 
how I have avoided the split by putting that 
"so" before that "to") for such reasons? 
Ought they not rather, assuming them to be 
knowledgeable people and people with a respect 
for the language which they are handling, to 
be brave enough to stand by phraseology which 
they use daily in speech, and which only by 
slow and laborious effort they can avoid in 
print? I am sure they ought. But though I 
still cling to a belief in the occasional split 
infinitive, I fear I shall not often have the 
courage to act up to my faith. I have never yet 
gone to the lengths of the precise London house- 
holder who has on his door " Do not ring unless 
an answer be required." But the " Constant 
Reader," so far as I am concerned, v/ill always 
retain his power. But if, widening his scope, he 
goes off grammatical errors into stock quota- 
tions and cliches (which are certainly at least 
as reprehensible) almost the whole British Press 
will go out of business. 

[99] 



DR. JOHNSON 

Mr. S. C. Roberts has compiled, the Cam- 
bridge University Press have pubhshed, and I 
have just read, a small book called Tlie Story 
of Doctor Johnson. It is virtually an introduc- 
tion to Boswell. It is ostensibly intended for 
children, but I think that there are some mil- 
lions of white adults who might profitably read 
it. For BoswelVs Life, though we are all sup- 
posed to have read it, is, as a fact, by many 
people taken for granted. They presume them- 
selves to have read it, just as they presume 
themselves to be familiar with the Bible, and if 
confronted with a question about Langton or 
Dr. Taylor or Topham Beauclerk they are as 
stuck as if they were catechised about Amos, 
Habakkuk, or the Epistle to the Galatians. 
And even if they are conscious, and willing to 
assert, that they have never opened Boswell, 
they are usually unaware of the value of what 
they missed. They think they know Johnson; 
but they do not. 

Most men who are not illiterate moujiks have 

[lOO] 



DR. JOHNSON 

some conception of Dr. Johnson's personality 
and opinions. They are familiar with the late 
Reynolds portrait; the wig, the lumbering 
shoulders and chest, the puffy eyes, fat, seamed 
face, loose but obstinate mouth. They prob- 
ably supplement the picture with printed de- 
scriptions, taken from Macaulay or elsewhere, 
of his stature and gait, his loud laugh, his 
domineering habit in conversation, his gross 
table manners, his dislike of clean linen, and 
his unpleasing custom of smearing gravy and 
potatoes over his clothes. They have heard 
typical sayings. He jeered perpetually at the 
aspiring and hungry Scot. He said that pa- 
triotism was the last refuge of a scoundrel; that 
a ship was a floating gaol; and that, when 
writing Parliamentary reports, he did not let 
the Whig dogs have the best of it. And, for 
the rest, he was customarily abusive, answering 
questions with " Sir, that is a very silly ques- 
tion," or " Then, sir, you are a great fool." 

That is the sort of picture of Johnson that 
lodges in the brain of the man who has not 
read Boswell; for the man who has not read 
Boswell is not likely to have read Sir John 
Hawkins or Mrs. Thrale. That it should exist, 
and should be so widely dispersed, is proof of 
the force and weight both of his personality and 

[lOl] 



LIFE AND LETTERS 

of Boswell's unequalled portrayal. No dead 
man lives so widely and so vividly; even Na- 
poleon is a more shadowy — and would, if he 
suddenly appeared at a tea-party, be a less 
recognisable — figure. But the popular concep- 
tion is wholly inadequate. It does not account 
for the reverence with which Johnson is by 
many held, the tender affection which many 
feel for him, and the verdict of many that, 
excepting one who is known to us only through 
his works, Samuel Johnson was the greatest of 
all Englishmen. 

He who knows Boswell, though he never look 
at a line of Johnson's frequently very revealing 
and entertaining original works, knows John- 
son outside and in. He knows him as the social 
figure, the Grub Street hack of early, the auto- 
cratic Great Cham of later, years; the diner- 
out and conversational giant who was the model 
of courtesy to women, the tyrannic disputant 
with men; the independent theorist who often 
on principle deferred to rank or office, but never 
cringed to a man. He knows him as a great if 
erratic scholar, a master of the classic languages 
from childhood, interested in all human affairs; 
the learned essayist and the herculean compiler 
who produced the first, and still almost the most 
interesting, of our standard dictionaries. He 
[102] 



DR. JOHNSON 

.aiows him as the proud and independent spirit 
who answered Chesterfield's tardy offer of 
patronage with the most crushing and eloquent 
letter in the language; and in whose character 
and demeanour no change of circumstances 
made the least difference. But he knows more; 
he gets below isolated phrases and acts into 
something deeper in which those were rooted, 
and of which they were sometimes only the 
fantastic flowers. He knows that Johnson's 
character was one of the noblest and his mind 
one of the sanest and most powerful of which 
w^e have record. 

Johnson was habitually dogmatic and fre- 
quently rude. These were faults if you like; 
but the noticeable point about them is that his 
friends did not resent them, and that if his 
verbal brutality hurt a super-sensitive person 
he always regretted it. But his faults were 
the defects of his qualities; he did have a grasp 
of things such as few men have had; Burke 
was content to receive light from him on poli- 
tics and Reynolds on painting. The prejudices 
which are so characteristic of him to common 
thinking did exist; but he was a humorist. 
Every humorist has his " stunts," and John- 
son's prejudices about Scotchmen and other 
bugbears were largely deliberate and artificial, 

[103] 



LIFE AND LETTERS 

kept up in order to give salt to life. They 
were not ungovernable: five of his six assistants 
on the dictionary were Scotch, as was Boswell; 
and, in spite of his remarks about Whigs being 
rascals and republicans, and suitable candidates 
for transportation, when he met Wilkes (who 
really was a rascal) at dinner he talked to him 
with great spirit and amiability. He had a 
habit of expressing his Toryism in extreme 
terms; but it had, as almost all his judgments 
on all subjects, a hard basis of reasoning tem- 
pered by common sense, which is often beyond 
reason. His Jacobitism, if it was hardly a 
joke, was, at all events, little more than a 
symbol; he was not the man to worship shib- 
boleths. He was not without sympathy with 
the generous parts of eighteenth-century Radi- 
calism; and if he was strongly anti-revolutionist, 
it was not because he was deliberately biased or 
had vested interests, but because, with his read- 
ing of history and human nature, he formed 
the conclusion that the necessity in his day was 
to insist on that need for " subordination " which 
so strongly impressed his mind. Other men 
differed; but he could, when he liked, put up a 
remarkably powerful case for any belief he held ; 
and even those who share none of his beliefs 
may well withhold condemnation of the Tory 
[104] 



DR. JOHNSON 

who in the middle of the eighteenth century 
said that " A decent provision for the poor is 
the true test of civihsation." 

Johnson, as a pohtician and as a critic, had, 
like all men, his limitations; but his common 
sense was such as to deserve the name of 
genius, and he continually surprises us with 
flashes of the profoundest insight. For behind 
his common-sense practicality was a troubled, 
suffering spirit to which all faiths and all doubts 
were known, all arguments, all fears, and all 
hopes presented themselves. The lumbering 
great " argufy er " and wag was fundamentally 
a man with a strong imagination and a large 
heart. He had a horror of death, and fought 
with it. He wrestled nightly with his besetting 
sins, chiefly that of indolence. Some of the 
prayers he wrote for himself bite very deep. 
He detested sentimental talk, but now and again 
the strength of his emotions broke through the 
crust, and a friend would reahse the depth of 
his affection for mother or wife, or one of the 
helpless dependents with whom he constantly 
saddled himself. He was intolerant of pre- 
sumptuous fools, rough with those who differed 
from him; nevertheless, he was one of the most 
generous, affectionate, and natural of men, and 
one of the most courageous. He said, years 

[los] 



LIFE AND LETTERS 

afterwards, that he and Dick Savage, having 
no money for beds, once spent the night trudg- 
ing round St. James's Square. They canvassed 
heaven, earth, and their woes; and in the end 
agreed " to stand by their country." 

He related it as a pathetic jest; but hardly, 
one imagines, without justifiable pride. For 
then, as always, he was consciously resolved 
not to let his personal distresses warp his judg- 
ments or distort his ideas of good and evil. 
The need for " clearing our minds of cant " and 
the other need of fighting the fears in our minds 
and the menaces of circumstance, are the two 
outstanding " lessons " — if one may use the 
word — that are driven home by his biography; 
and any child or adult who is led to Boswell 
by Mr. Roberts's ingenious and well-illustrated 
manual must, I conceive, benefit morally, as 
well as being entertained as he will seldom be 
in a normal life. 



[io6] 



I 



A PUZZLE 

I THINK, but I may be in error, that George 
Meredith himself requested that there should be 
no " official life " of himself. Certainly such a 
veto would be natural in him, for he was, save 
under the veil of fiction, secretive about large 
portions of his experience. The life recently 
pubhshed (George Meredith, by S. M. Ellis) 
is, however, by a cousin of his, and some of the 
material included appears with the permission 
of his son; it may, therefore, be regarded as 
being as near an intimate life as anything we are 
likely to get. 

It is not a very good book. The author's 
English is not of the first order; and a great 
deal of space is taken up with quotations — many 
of which are superfluous — from Meredith's 
works. All the industry that has obviously been 
lavished on it has failed to disinter any informa- 
tion about several of his early years, and it is 
in large measure a compilation from letters and 
the published remarks of Meredith's critics and 
friends. But what Meredith did in his seven- 

[107] 



LIFE AND LETTERS 

teenth year — when he can only be presumed to 
have been in London — does not seriously mat- 
ter; and there is no need to complain that the 
" new facts " produced are not more exhaustive. 
My complaint is that after reading this book, as 
after reading Meredith's novels and poems, I 
still do not know Meredith, am still puzzled by 
him, and am still (I admit it with all diffidence) 
irritated by him. That I, an individual, feel 
like this about a man held by many to be great 
and good could interest no one but myself; but 
I know that both my bewilderment and my irri- 
tation are shared by others. 

I have often asked people, very catholic in 
their tastes, why they did not like Meredith: 
I have never got a satisfactory explanation yet. 
There are a few actions in his life at which posi- 
tive blame has been levelled. He apparently 
treated his first wife very badly when, in her 
last illness, he refused to go to see her. He 
quarrelled with his father and he quarrelled 
with his eldest son. His refusal to see either 
wife or son on their death-beds is here half ex- 
cused by his shrinking from sickness and death: 
one can only say that the facts are not complete 
enough to enable one to form a judgment either 
way. During his three years of journalism he 
wrote, for a Conservative paper, violent attacks 
[io8] 



A PUZZLE 

upon the North, Lincoln, and John Bright, al- 
though his personal opinions were the opposite 
of those of the paper. He annoyed many peo- 
ple by his exaggerated secretiveness about his 
parentage and the place of his birth (which he 
would never give properly, even in a work of 
reference) ; ten years after his marriage one of 
his close friends was merely guessing that he had 
been married. But people feel a certain remote- 
ness from him who are unaware of all this; I 
know I always did myself. It is hard to define. 
Even " distaste " seems too strong a word for 
the feeling and the image used by Henry James 
who, when looking for something wrong about 
d'Annunzio, compared himself to the plumber 
searching a house for the source of a bad smell, 
comes into one's mind only to be dismissed. 
What is the characteristic that repels? 

Those who have called him a snob because he 
insisted on writing about leisured Olympians 
and never mentioned the Portsmouth shop are 
superficial on the first point and demonstrably 
wrong on the second; for, in a novel, he ex- 
pounded his family history without taking the 
slightest pains to avoid identification. In any 
event it is not a defect of that sort one is look- 
ing for, but something far deeper and more per- 
vasive, a streak which gives a tone to everything 

[109] 



LIFE AND LETTERS 

he wrote and all that is recorded of him. What 
was his character, one wonders? Was he a 
mind, tastes, a temper, without deep generous 
affections ? How can one ask that of a man who 
expressed himself so profusely? Is not the 
reason that he concealed himself behind a mask? 
What was there behind the mask? Worse ques- 
tion of all, was there anything behind the mask? 
So one question leads to another! One thinks 
of him as a pretender, a poser, a man who could 
not be himself. One links up his personal se- 
cretiveness with the abominable artificialities of 
his style. These appear early. At twenty-one 
he writes of a poem to the publisher " It was 
written immediately on receipt of the intelli- 
gence which it chaunts " ; and one feels that 
some common word had been struck out and the 
exotic word put in; a method of procedure 
habitual to him when he wrote poems. One 
reflects on the thinness of the so-called philoso- 
phy which has deluded many simple people by 
the pretentiousness with which he covered up the 
triteness of his earth-worship in difficult jargon. 
One remembers his most-quoted mots; the thin- 
concealed platitudinousness of the statement 
(how on earth do critics persuade themselves 
that it is brilliantly illuminating?) about man 
having rounded Seraglio Point but not yet dou- 
[no] 



A PUZZLE 

bled Cape Turk. One thinks of the mounds of 
tinsel tropes, not images smoking from the 
heated imagination, but gauds of fancy fabric- 
ated by a very deft hand. One remembers his 
indefensible obscurity. The obscurity of Blake 
was that of the stammering visionary; that of 
Browning was sometimes the obscurity of care- 
lessness and sometimes that of over-rapid 
thought, but there was always something there. 
The tortuous difficulties of Meredith are made 
up like the maze at Hampton Court, and when 
|i you have threaded them you find that there is 
nothing there, or something quite simple, like 
a square of green grass. Look at the Woods 
of Westermain: 

Hither, hither, if you will, 
Drink instruction, or instil. 
Run the woods like vernal sap. 
Crying, hail to luminousness ! 

But have care. 
In yourself may lurk the trap 
On conditions they caress. 
Here you meet the light invoked, 
Here is never secret cloaked. 
Doubt you with the monster's fry 
All his orbit may exclude ; 
Are you of the stifiF, the dry. 
Cursing the not understood? 
Grasp you with the monster's claws ; 
Govern with his truncheon-saws; 

[III] 



LIFE AND LETTERS 

Hate, the shadow of a grain; 
You are lost in Westermain. 
Earthward swoops a vulture sun, 
Nighted upon carrion. 
Straightway venom wine-cups shout 
Toasts to One whose eyes are out. 

The man who is not annoyed by that is a devo- 
tee indeed; and Carlyle himself never equalled 
the roundabout artificialities of a writer who 
would sprinkle his letters with made-up perver- 
sions like (I take the first to hand) " I am now 
bather anew in the Pierian Fount." He would 
always write " fit not " instead of " do not fit " 
or " Thank-song " instead of " song of thanks- 
giving." A vocabulary or an order used by 
his fellows was an abomination to him. Was it 
that he was in perpetual dread of thinness, not 
merely anxious to display, but positively afraid 
to be himself since himself was not a good 
enough thing to be? And even when that is ad- 
mitted, does not something still remain; some- 
thing quite positively objectionable; an attitude 
towards things, and especially towards women, 
which one can only vaguely indicate by calling 
it a sort of refined gloating? 

So our thoughts proceed. And then we check ; 
realising that he did great things and that great 
men found him great. " Not an artist, oh, not 
an artist," said Henry James to a friend, " biil 

[112] 



A PUZZLE 

he did the best things best." Part at least of a 
poet was in him. The famous things come into 
one's mind: the scene at the weir in Feverel, 
stanzas of Love in a Valley, the blossoming tree 
in The Egoist, the sonnet on Prince Lucifer, 
and passages in Modern Love. The mystery 
and the bewilderment return; we doubt his pow- 
ers but admit his achievement, we call him con- 
noisseur and poseur, and find him writing of 
people like a man and of nature like an enthu- 
siast. But for me, I tell myself this, but still 
I find that I am not in contact with him, that I 
do not know him, that I do not relish the thought 
that there are books of his which still remain 
unread by me, that I do not genuinely like him, 
and that when I find that after his death — he 
complained continually that this was so during 
his life — the large public still refuses to read 
him, I am not surprised. A few years ago a 
small and comparatively cheap edition-de-luxe 
of his poems was published. Before long, though 
his name was famous and nobody denied that 
he had written some beautiful poetry, the book 
was to be bought cheap as a remainder. I may 
be confessing my limitations in saying so, and 
I respect some of Meredith's warmest admirers ; 
but I never felt more genuinely a democrat than 
when that book failed. 

[113] 



TOM THUMB 

The American nation — as the alcoholic are 
now learning — does not do things by halves. 
Having decided to " prosecute the study " of 
English literature, American Universities are 
producing critical monographs and exotic re- 
prints at a pace never before equalled. Great 
stress is laid, when young men and women pro- 
duce theses for the literary doctorate, upon the 
need for tackling new subjects. This attitude, 
so far as criticism is concerned, has led to an ex- 
cessive pursuit of minutiae; despairing students 
have to invent subjects like " The Colour of the 
Hair of Shakespeare's Clowns " in order to be 
certain that they are exploring genuinely un- 
traversed ground. But the passion for novelty 
shown by those who edit texts is entirely to be 
commended. It is much more interesting and 
useful to dig up some obscure but amusing work 
and annotate it than to produce yet one more 
edition of Hamlet or Endymion. During the 
war, American editors have resuscitated several 
good neglected poets, such as Cleveland and 

["4] 



TOM THUMB 

Lady Winchilsea, and amongst numerous prose 
enterprises there have been several editions of 
minor classics of the eighteenth century. One 
is a competently edited reprint of both versions 
of Fielding's Tom Thumb (The Tragedy of 
Tragedies), by Professor James T. Hillhouse, 
published in this country by the Oxford Univer- 
sity Press. 

Fielding's most amusing play — the very name 
of which must be unfamiliar to most readers of 
Tom Jones — was written when he was twenty- 
four, and enlarged shortly after. It is a lam- 
poon on the heroic verse tragedy produced by 
Dryden and his mouthing successors; and the 
selection of the fairy-tale of Tom Thumb (who 
is the bold hero) as its theme well illustrates the 
extravagant vigour and high spirits of the whole 
work. Its success on the stage showed that the 
London public was ready to turn away from the 
bombast and fustian that the literati had palmed 
ojff on it; the range of careful reading attested 
both by its text and by Fielding's solemn foot- 
notes, prove the absurdity of the common legend 
that in his youth the novelist was a dissolute 

).i waster. 

P 

' The work is so good that even one who had 
never read any of the plays parodied would 
heartily enjoy it and at the same time realise 

[lis] 



LIFE AND LETTERS 

precisely what these plays must have been. 
Fielding's humour is at his best in the ironic 
preface, where he professes to treat the play as 
an Elizabethan relic from which the authors he 
is ridiculing have cribbed. " I shall ware," he | 
adds, " at present, what hath caused such Feuds \ 
in the learned World, Whether this Piece was 
originally written by Shakespear, tho' certainly 
That, were it true, must add a considerable 
Share to its Merit; especially, with such who are 
so generous as to buy and commend what they 
never read, from an implicit Faith in the Au- 
thor only: A Faith! which our Age abounds 
in as much, as it can be called deficient in any 
other." There follow the dramatis personae. 
Amongst them are King Arthur, " A passion- 
ate sort of King, Husband to Queen Dollalolla, 
of whom he stands a little in Fear " ; Tom 
Thumb the Great; Merlin; Noodle, and Doo- 
dle, " Courtiers in Place, and consequently of 
that party that is uppermost " ; Parson, " of the 
side of the Church " ; Glumdalca, Queen of the 
Giants, who is in love with Tom Thumb; and 
these two: 

"Queen Dollalolla, Wife to King Arthur, and 
Mother to Huncamunca, a Woman entirely 
faultless, saving that she is a little given to 
[ii6] 



TOM THUMB 

Drink; a little too much a Virago towards her 
Husband, and in Love with Tom Thumb. 

" The Princess Huncamunca, Daughter to 
their Majesties King Arthur and Queen Dolla- 
lolla, of a very sweet, gentle, and amorous Dis- 
position, equally in love with Lord Grizzle and 
Tom Thumb, and desirous to be married to 
both." 

The minor characters are stated to include 
" Courtiers, Guards, Rebels, Drums, Trump- 
ets, Thunder, and Lightning." 

Three extremely strenuous and sanguinary 
acts ensue: intrigues, wars, assassinations. The 
language is often drawn from the plays paro- 
died: "extreme" sentences being accumulated 
with absurd effect. The style may be illus- 
trated by the Queen's speech when she first 
hears that her daughter is going to marry (she 
herself is in love with him) Tom Thumb. 
Everyone remembers how, in the fairy-tale, Tom 
Thumb narrowly escaped death by falling into 
a pudding his mother was making: 

I Odsbobs ! I have a mind to hang myself, 

I To think I should a Grandmother be made 

By such a Raskal — Sure the King forgets 
When in a Pudding, by his Mother put 
The Bastard, by a Tinker, on a stile 

[117] 



LIFE AND LETTERS 

Was drop'd — O, good Lord Grizzle ! can I bear 
To see him from a Pudding mount the Throne? 
Or can. Oh can! my Huncamunca bear 
To take a Pudding's Offspring to her Arms 

Which reminds one of the lady in The Import- 
ance of Being Earnest, who said her daughter 
should not " contract a marriage with a cloak- 
room and enter into an alliance with a hand- 
bag." A little later Huncamunca, with ludi- 
crous effect and a reminiscence of Romeo and 
Juliet, cries: 

O Tom Thumb! Tom Thumb! wherefore art thou Tom 
Thumb, 

but that is not, as a single line, equal in effect 
to the end of Glumdalca's passionate outburst 
when refused by Tom: 

I'm all within a Hurricane, as if 

The World's four winds were pent within my carcass, 

Confusion, Horror, Murder, Guts, and Death. 

A further reminiscence of Shakespeare occurs 
when the King, at the dread hour of night, en- 
counters the ghost of Tom Thumb's father. 
He threatens him: 

Ghost: Threaten others with that Word, 

I am a ghost, and am already dead. 

King: Ye Stars! 'tis well; were thy last Hour to come. 
This Moment had been it. . . . 

[ii8] 



TOM THUMB 

In the end, all the characters kill each other. 
The moral, says the author, is not less excellent 
than the tale. It teaches " these two instructive 
lessons, viz.. That Human Happiness is exceed- 
ing transient, and that Death is the certain end 
of all Men; the former whereof is inculcated by 
the fatal end of Tom Thumb ; the latter, by that 
of all the other personages." 

There are reasons — that is to say, there is a 
reason — why Tom Thumb should not be revived 
in the modern theatre; though the unshrinking 
Stage Society might undertake it. But though 
this is a pity, it is a greater pity that no one to- 
day writes anything like it. Fielding's butts 
are dead and gone. The plays of Young, Banks, 
Nat Lee, Rowe, are unfamiliar in detail even 
to most close students of our literature; Jemmy 
Thomson's great tragedy is remembered only 
by the immortal line " O Sophonisba, Sopho- 
nisba O," which critics (quite justifiably) copy 
out of each other's books without ever referring 
to the original; and even the heroic tragedies 
of Dryden himself are seldom acted, and never, 
save by Professor Saintsbury, read. But con- 
temporary game exists at which the writer of 
burlesque might shoot with far more effect and 
far more profit to his audience. 

I remember nothing of the kind being done 

["9] 



LIFE AND LETTERS 

except the late Mr. Pelissier's Potted Plays. 
These, though delicious, were very short and 
paid insufficient attention to the more preten- 
tious kind of modern plays which, like the 
heroics of Fielding's time, are taken seriously 
by intelligent people. The epigrammatic social 
comedy derived from Wilde is common enough 
to be effectively lampooned; so is the drab 
bourgeois play descended from Ibsen; so is 
the rural drama, English, Scotch, Welsh, and 
Irish, of which the type, and the most successful, 
is Mr. Marsefield's Nan; so is the industrial 
play in which the hard business magnate is 
at daggers drawn with his employees and his 
rebellious progeny. Parody on the stage is a 
neglected art; but this does not necessarily 
imply that there is no public for it. And the 
easiest and most popular thing of all to do 
would be a musical comedy, in which music, 
sentiment, and jokes should all burlesque the 
stuff' we have been given for the last twenty 
years. 



[120] 



SIDELIGHTS ON THE 
VICTORIANS 

" Bust by Woolner." This phrase is familiar 
enough in catalogues and guide-books, but very- 
few people know who Woolner was or what 
sort of person he was. Nevertheless, Woolner 
was one of the original seven members of the 
Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood. As such he must 
necessarily be of some interest to the historian 
of nineteenth-century art. And I opened his 
long-delayed Biography {Thomas Woolner, His 
Life in Letters, Chapman and Hall) in the 
expectation of learning something new about 
the Victorian era. By something new I do not 
mean something really surprising: such as that 
the great Victorians had blue beards or walked 
on their heads. What I mean is that I expected 
something more than the tiny driblet of un- 
known letters that we usually get in a book 
published so long after the event as is this 
one. I have not been disappointed. Woolner's 
daughter has had the extremely sensible idea 
of giving us an idea of his life through the let- 

[I2I] 



I 

LIFE AND LETTERS 

ters he wrote and received, instead of telling us 
in the first person, and at prodigious length, 
what her father said to her mother at breakfast 
on November 22, 1870, and recording at length 
the births, careers, deaths, and tombstones of 
the various dogs he owned in his life. Wool- 
ner corresponded with many of the most emi- 
nent men of his time. His most profuse 
correspondent was Mrs. Tennyson — whose hus- 
band, usually referred to here as the Bard, was 
evidently too lazy to write letters himself — 
and amongst the others were Rossetti, Coventry 
Patmore, Carlyle, Mrs. Carlyle, Vernon Lush- 
ington and others of the Pre-Raphaelite and 
Tennysonian sets. The book is a sort of tail- 
piece to the existing literature of the period, 
and all future writers about the Victorian age 
or its principal figures will find something in 
it which they will have to quote. It is a notice- 
able thing — and one that throws a genial light 
upon Woolner's character — that almost all the 
hundreds of letters given are familiar and 
homely in tone. There are very few rhapsodies 
and there is very little fine writing; when com- 
municating with Woolner people did not pour 
out their inmost souls, but, on the other hand, 
they refrained from anything forced or in the 
nature of humbug. The book as a whole, there- 
[122] 



SIDELIGHTS ON THE VICTORIANS 

fore, though uninspiring is amusing throughout. 
Woolner was born in 1825 and died in 1892. 
In his early years he was the friend of Rossetti, 
at his death he was an honorary member of a 
City Company. So it is to be expected that 
his early correspondence would be more inter- 
esting than his later, and the expectation is 
fulfilled. Especially good are the letters he 
received from Rossetti when, having despaired 
of earning his living as a sculptor, he was seek- 
ing his fortune in the gold fields of Australia. 
Later disciples of the Pre-Raphaelites tended 
rather to forget that the Pre-Raphaelites were 
the most robust of men. The apparent discord- 
ance between their characters and their works 
is not difficult to explain. They were artists, 
they were living in a smug, materialistic world 
which ignored the finer impulses of the spirit, 
and they went to extremes. It might almost be 
said that since the world around them thought 
of nothing but money, they deliberately painted 
and wrote about people who could not con- 
ceivably earn their livings, and because they 
saw around them a generation peculiarly gross 
and bustling they were forced into the extrava- 
gance of creating ideal figures who might be 
deemed incapable of eating, and who in no 
circumstances could be conceived of as jump- 

[123] 



LIFE AND LETTERS 

ing a five-barred gate. But the languorous 
and swan-necked women of Rossetti, the attenu- 
ated, almost transparent, princesses of Burne 
Jones, the gentle Utopians of William Morris, 
were merely the escapes, as it were, of full 
natures starved in actual life. Burne Jones 
was one of the wittiest and j oiliest talkers of 
the nineteenth century, and filled his letters 
with uncomplimentary caricatures of himself. 
The most characteristic story about William 
Morris is that which records the horror of a 
high ecclesiastic who, after standing a quarter 
of an hour in the poet's waiting-room, heard a 
loud voice come down the stairs : " Now send 
up that bloody bishop." Rossetti, until he took 
to drugs, was another of the same mould; and 
it gives one peculiar pleasure to find from 
AVoolner's biography that, even at the begin- 
ning, when the Pre-Raphaelites stood to gain 
everything from the commendation of so cele- 
brated a man, Rossetti could not stand the 
humbug of that pompous though well-meaning 
pontiff, John Ruskin. " As," he writes, " he is 
only half informed about art, anything he says 
in favour of one's work is, of course, sure to 
prove invaluable in a professional way." Then 
very shortly afterwards Woolner subjoins the 
following remarks: 
[124] 



SIDELIGHTS ON THE VICTORIANS 

*' I should like Ruskin to know what he never 
knew — the want of money for a year or two; 
then he might come to doubt his infallibility 
and give an artist working on the right road 
the benefit of any little doubt that might arise. 
The little despot imagines himself the Pope 
of Art, and would wear 3 crowns as a right, 
only they might make him look funny in 
London! " 

Add to this Rossetti's description of his own 
early and much photogravured Annunciation 
as " my white abomination," and the gentle- 
man who bought it as " an Irish maniac," and 
we get a fairly good indication of the essential 
healthiness of the Pre-Raphaelite movement. 

All through the book there are supplementary 
scraps for the biographers. In 1857 Woolner 
wrote to Mrs. Tennyson: 

" I was grieved to hear the death of Mr. Bar- 
rett, not on the old gentleman's account, but 
because I know the distress it will occasion to 
poor Mrs. Browning, who quite worshipped the 
old man, however unworthy of it he was. He 
never would be reconciled to her after her mar- 
riage, but adopted the somewhat odd plan of 
hating her for the deed. Poor ^Irs. Browning 
bribed the butler to let her father's dining- 

[I2S] 



LIFE AND LETTERS 

room blind remain up a little way that she 
might obtain one glimpse of him from the 
street before she started for Florence. She was 
so weak the poor little creature had to hold on 
by area rails while she looked her last at her 
cruel father, then went home and spent the 
evening in crying. 

" Another of the old gentleman's whims was 
not to allow either of his sons to learn any 
business or profession." 

There is a very typical letter from Carlyle 
(1864) beginning: 

" Deae Woolner — I at once sign and re- 
turn: — I would even walk in suppliant proces- 
sion to the Hon. House (if necessary) bare- 
headed and in sackcloth and ashes, entreating 
said Hon. Long-eared Assembly to deliver us 
from that most absurd of all Farce-Tragedies 
daily played under their supervision." 

The House of Commons we have always with 
us. That some politicians have their feelings 
is, however, shown in the story about Mr. 
Gladstone and " Granny " Granville weeping, 
in unison, over one of Tennyson's Idylls. This 
subject is suitable for the pencil of Mr. Max 
Beerbohm, as is also that other description, 

[126] 



SIDELIGHTS ON THE VICTORIANS 

given in a letter from the present Lord Tenny- 
son (then a child) of The Bard painting a 
summer-house. He did it, we are assured, " all 
by himself." The best story in the book, how- 
ever, concerns a notability whose name is, un- 
fortunately, not given. He took the sculptor's 
wife in to dinner and almost completely ignored 
her. After dinner, in the drawing-room, he 
came up to her and said: "Mrs. Woolner, if I 
had known who you were, I should have paid 
you more attention." Can it have been Sir 
Willoughby Patterne? 

But what of Woolner? The truth is I have 
been shirking him. He was evidently the friend 
of great men, and himself a model of all the 
virtues. He could certainly make good busts, 
and his early portraits of Tennyson — before 
the poet became a prophet and covered his 
beautiful mouth and chin with a Pentateuchal 
beard — are masterly. Some of the best are 
reproduced in this volume: of Sidgwick and 
Cardinal Newman no stronger or more in- 
formative portraits exist than Woolner's. But 
busts are one thing. Imaginative sculpture is 
another. Woolner, with something interesting 
before him, could see what was there and model 
what he saw, though he usually began prettify- 
ing when he was doing a medallion — which he 

[127] 



LIFE AND LETTERS 

always, irritatingly, called a " med." Genuine 
creative faculty he had none: no powerful 
thoughts or passions insisting on expression: 
nothing more than a taste for the drooping, and 
a mild affection for the softer virtues. His 
statues of blind boys, bluecoat boys. Heavenly 
Welcome, Achilles shouting from the Trenches, 
Feeding the Hungry, Lady Godiva, and (a 
bad one) The Housemaid, are not Pre- 
Raphaelitism, nor anything else except sheer 
undiluted, uninspired, smooth, sentimental, de- 
generate Victorian descendants of Flaxman. 
JMr. Dombey might have bought any of them 
in his softer moments, and one is forced to 
admit that the most interesting thing about 
Woolner is his diary of two years in the early 
Australian diggings. It is vividly and vigor- 
ously written and, unlike most stories of the 
sort, it does not conclude its depressing record 
of failure with the discovery of a nugget as 
large as a baby's head. Woolner came home 
richer by nothing save experience, and of that, 
to all appearance, he made little use. 



[128] 



SIR CHARLES DILKE 

In almost every chapter of Sir Charles Dilke's 
Life, there is enough material for a Quarterly 
article. His experience of, and judgments 
upon, foreign politics would in themselves make 
a valuable book. He was in politics for fifty 
years; was at one time a candidate for the 
Premiership; he knew and corresponded with 
what one may call the front benches of five 
continents, and touched every sphere of social 
life. His versatility was amazing. At Cam- 
bridge he was top of the Law Tripos, Presi- 
dent of the Union, and, but for his doctor, 
would have rowed twice against Oxford. He 
read, it seems, a large part of the contents of 
the British Museum; he was asked to do Keats 
for the "English Men of Letters" series; he 
travelled, rowed, fenced and dined out almost 
all his life; and he found time to acquire on 
every subject of current politics an amount 
of information which was a storehouse for every 
individual and organisation that ever worked 
with him. But if it is quite impossible to 

[129] 



LIFE AND LETTERS 

review his biography because there is too much 
in it, from another point of view it is difficult 
to review it because there is too little. It is 
largely composed of his own memoirs: but one 
learns scarcely anything about the essential man 
from it. 

There is an interesting communication here 
from General Seely, who says that for a long 
time he could not make out what on earth 
Dilke was up to; and how at last he found that 
his only motive was an unselfish desire to help 
his more unfortunate fellow-men. It cannot 
but have been that; but the slowness with 
which General Seely appreciated it is the meas- 
ure of Dilke's extraordinary reticence. How 
far his intimates got past this — how far, that 
is, he ever had an intimate — one cannot tell; 
but, dead as alive, the outside observer cannot 
really feel he knows him. All his life he was 
to some extent a sphinx, though an active and 
loquacious sphinx. In later years there was an 
added mystery; for he possessed, in the public 
eye, a special secret, whether it was the secret 
of his guilt or the secret of his innocence. But, 
apart from that, he did not disclose himself; 
and it is possible that he did not even know 
himself. You can only get at his soul by in- 
ference. And this much is certain — and the 

[130] 



SIR CHARLES DILKE 

justice or injustice of his condemnation after 
the scandal is not relevant here — that no man 
ever put up a finer show after a knock-down 
blow. He did not sulk, or take to drink, or 
even, as he might pardonably have done, retire 
to the country and read; he faced the music and 
began a second political career, determining by 
sheer doggedness to induce his country to profit 
by a desire and ability to serve her which have 
seldom been united, in such a degree, in a single 
man. He succeeded so completely that, at the 
end of his life, the later Dilke had completely 
obscured the earlier Dilke in men's minds. That 
is not failure in the private man. And it is 
arguable that Dilke was not even a comparative 
failure as a politician. In these later years — 
his last two Parliaments saw him sitting, 
straight-backed, beautifully dressed, fortified 
with many blue-books, with the new Labour 
Party — he was directly and indirectly respon- 
sible for most important reforms, notably the 
Trade Boards Act. His advice behind the 
scenes was so freely sought and given that he 
may properly be regarded as an unofficial leader 
of the Labour movement. He did far more 
than he got recognition for; but he had lost the 
desire for leadership; and, having rehabilitated 
himself in the eyes of his coimtrymen, he was 

[131] 



LIFE AND LETTERS 

not anxious for recognition of any other kind. 
Influence — to be exercised in the pubhc inter- 
est — was what he wanted and got. And it is 
at least arguable that he would have done little 
more had nothing gone wrong than he did as 
things were. For, in spite of his intellectual 
attainments, integrity and force of character, he 
had drawbacks which critics, for the moment, 
seem to have forgotten. 

It seems, in short, now to be commonly as- 
sumed that had it not been for the Crawford 
catastrophe, Dilke would have become leader 
of his party and Prime Minister. Gladstone 
expected him to be, and Chamberlain had 
agreed that he should be so on account of his 
superior authority in the House. Speculation 
on the point is of the " If Napoleon had won 
Waterloo " type : you may advance many rea- 
sons for whatever view you hold, but you cannot 
approach proof. But personally, not only do I 
think that Chamberlain — leaving other candi- 
dates out of the question — would have inevitably j 
overtaken Dilke had the partnership lasted and i 
prospered, but I cannot easily persuade myself 
that anything could have made a Prime Min- 
ister out of Dilke. He was a statesman: and 
he was exceedingly skilful as a mere politician 
who knew the best way in which to get things 
[132] 



SIR CHARLES DILKE 

done. His knowledge was immense of many 
kinds. He was fitted for any ministerial post, 
and had he become, in later years, Foreign Sec- 
retary, Colonial Secretary, Secretary for India, 
Home Secretary, President of the L.G.B., 
President of the Board of Education, or Presi- 
dent of the Board of Trade, he would have 
known more about any of these jobs than any 
other politician of his time. Everybody who 
knew him respected him: most people who met 
him liked him; his constituents, both in Chelsea 
and in the Forest of Dean, were exceedingly 
proud of him. A man to be Prime Minister 
may have far less knowledge, sense and dis- 
interested patriotism than Dilke; but unless 
accident has given him the, as it were, auto- 
matic support of some strong " interest," local, 
commercial, social or religious, he must have the 
power of exciting or amusing, at any rate in- 
teresting, the electorate. Dilke's personality 
was not of the sort which captivates large 
masses of electors. Writing himself of a speech 
he made in his twenties, he says: 

" It was a dreary speech; and, given the fact 
that my speaking was always monotonous, and 
that at this time I was trying specially to make 
speeches which no one could call empty noise, 

[133] 



LIFE AND LETTERS 

and was therefore specially and peculiarly 
heavy, there was something amusing to lovers 
of contrast in that between the stormy hearti- 
ness of my reception at most of these meetings, 
and the ineffably dry orations which I delivered 
to them — between cheers of joy when I rose 
and cheers of relief when I sat down." 

This was a peculiar occasion, for the discussion 
over the Civil List had given Sir Charles a 
fleeting reputation as a Republican fire-eater 
and the audiences assembled in a state of ex- 
citement. As a rule, you got the " ineffably 
dry " speech without the cheers. In his last 
ten years his habits of discursiveness and dron- 
ing had got so acute that he was impossible to 
follow. ^Vhatever the subject — and it might 
be anything from Army organisation to the 
sweated chainmakers of Cradley Heath — he 
v/ould stand up and pour out thousands of facts 
in a monotonous, gruff boom, his words periodi- 
cally becoming inaudible as he buried his head 
in his notes or turned round to pick up a 
profusely annotated blue-book from his seat. 
The Minister concerned would stay; a few ex- 
perts on the particular subject under discussion 
would compel themselves to attend, knowing 
that his matter was bound to be valuable if they 

[134] 



i 



SIR CHARLES DILKE 

could only get the hang of it; the rest would go. 
His character was universally respected; he 
was admired as a repository of information and 
wisdom, and a young member, of whatever 
party, who was congratulated by him upon a 
speech got a more genuine pleasure out of his 
praises than from any perfunctory compliments 
from the front benches. Nevertheless, nothing 
could stop his audiences from dwindling away 
or his voice from lulling the survivors to sleep. 
He knew that his voice was monotonous: that 
he could not help. But he had also an intel- 
lectual disability which made him treat every 
small fact as if it were of equal value to almost 
any other fact, and a pronounced tempera- 
mental disinclination to be " rhetorical." He 
was too reticent to show his personality: and 
he would not manufacture a sham personality 
for public exhibition. He hated importing feel- 
ing into his speeches, however strong might be 
the passion for justice or mercy behind them: 
he deliberately refused to make an easy appeal 
by frequent reference to " first principles " or 
cultivate those arts of expression whereby poli- 
tics may be made enjoyable to bodies of men, 
or even those arts of arrangement whereby 
they may be made simple and comprehensible. 
He felt all these things to be humbug, and hum- 

[135] 



LIFE AND LETTERS 

bug was abhorrent to him: faihng to observe 
that, since under our system speeches are an 
important part of a controversiahst's career and 
of a minister's administration, it is the business 
of a man who would lead his countrymen to 
pay some attention — unless he is a demagogue 
born — to the technique of " rhetoric." In pri- 
vate conversation Dilke is reported to have been 
one of the most interesting men of his age. But 
on the platform and in the House of Commons 
he was distinctly and undeniably dull. And it 
is possible that England would not have stood a 
Radical Prime Minister who sent her to sleep. 



[136] 



THE UTOPIAN SATIRIST 

Mr. Charles Whibley has published, 
through the University Press, the LesHe 
Stephen Lecture dehvered by him at Cam- 
bridge. It was a good lecture, if rather per- 
meated with Mr. Whibley's political cranks; 
and its chief object is to show that Macaulay 
and other critics have been hopelessly astray 
in describing Swift as a low and beastly ruffian 
who hated human society and was emphatically 
unfit for it. 

Mr. Whibley is, of com'se, right. Macaulay 
and Thackeray were completely wrong. I do 
not think it is quite just to say that Macaulay 's 
opinion was founded on Whig prejudices: far 
more probably it arose from sheer disgust at 
Swift's frequent filthiness, and from misappre- 
hension of his custom of representing men, 
when he was attacking them, as larded with 
all the disagreeable concomitants of the sty. 
But vilely as he abused mankind, and habitu- 
ated though he may have become to exagger- 
ated invective, his first impulse was an idealistic 



LIFE AND LETTERS 

one. He detested men, not because they were 
men, but because they were not the men they 
might be. When he called himself a misan- 
thrope, he went on to explain that he intended 
to prove " the falsity of that definition animal 
rationale^, and to show it should be only rationis 
capax/' He uses his communities in Gulliver 
to expose in the most savage way the defects of 
Western civilisation: but can those who call this 
" cynical " deny that the defects were there? 
Mr. Whibley refers very properly to his accept- 
ance of the " generous creed " of the King of 
Brobdingnag, " that whoever could make two 
ears of corn, or two blades of grass, to grow 
t upon a spot of ground where only one grew 
before, would deserve better of mankind, and do 
more essential service to his country, than the 
whole race of politicians put together." Mr. 
Whibley himself has so marked a disbelief in all 
politicians that he allows this " simple doc- 
trine " to stand by itself. But the Utopia in 
Swift's heart even had room for better poli- 
ticians. Take the introduction to the school of 
political projectors in Laputa: 

" In the school of political projectors I was but 
ill entertained, the professors appearing in my 
judgment wholly out of their senses, which is 

[138] 



THE UTOPIAN SATIRIST 

a scene that never fails to make me melancholy. 
These unhappy people were proposing schemes 
for persuading monarchs to choose favourites 
upon the score of their wisdom, capacity, and 
virtue ; of teaching ministers to consult the pub- 
lic good; of rewarding merit, great abilities, 
eminent services; of instructing princes to know 
their true interest by placing it on the same 
foundation with that of their people; of choos- 
ing for employments persons qualified to exer- 
cise them; with many other wild impossible 
chimaeras, that never entered before into the 
heart of man to conceive, and confirmed 
in me the old observation, that there is 
nothing so extravagant and irrational which 
some philosophers have not maintained for 
I truth." 

j It is surely obvious that these are not the 
sentences of a hater of mankind, but those of 
one who was continually haunted or tormented 
by the undeveloped possibilities of mankind. 
Man is " capable of reason " — and will not use 
it. Swift himself stated that he would " forfeit 
his life, if any one opinion can be fairly deduced 
from that book, [Tlie Tale of a Tub'] w^hich is 
contrary to Religion or Morality." It depends, 
of course, upon what you mean by Religion; 

[139] 



LIFE AND LETTERS 

and a clergyman of the Established Church was, 
to say the least, unorthodox when he informed 
the Houyhnhms that " difference of opinions 
hath cost many millions of lives; for instance, 
whether flesh be bread, or bread be flesh ; whether 
the juice of a certain berry be blood or wine.'* 
But generally speaking, his claim was not ab- 
surd. Even his obscenities could scarcely give 
anyone a taste for the obscene, and, compre- 
hensive though his irony is, he seldom if ever 
jeers at genuine virtue or makes sport of suf- 
fering. As Mr. Whibley suggests, it is con- 
ceivable that his ironic method has misled 
people; though how anyone in his senses could 
have supposed that he meant to be taken liter- 
ally when he argued that the superfluous chil- 
dren of the poor Irish should be exported for 
food, it is difficult to conceive. Some, at least, 
of his contemporaries gave him credit for good 
intentions. The Irish, at one period, would 
have risen in rebellion had the Government 
attacked him. Pope, Harley and Bolingbroke 
knew the warmth of his affections. And an 
obscure publisher, who printed his poems, after 
remarking on the savagery with which he had 
written about women and Whigs, thought fit to 
add: "We have been assured by several ju- 
dicious and learned gentlemen, that what the 
[140] 



I THE UTOPIAN SATIRIST 

author hath here writ, on either of those two 
Subjects, hath no other Aim than to reform the 
Errors of both Sexes." Surely a large and 
lofty aim! 

The same bookseller, in the same apology, 
made another true, if oddly expressed, observa- 
tion: "Whatever he writ, whether good, bad 
or inplifferent, is an Original in itself." Swift 
was one of the most natural writers we have 
ever had. He did not bother at all about 
his sentences: he had a quick, vivid, witty, 
logical mind, and his style has precisely those 
I qualities. Mr. Whibley justly compares him to 
I Defoe, both for his easy simplicity and for his 
' power of realistic narrative. To make one be- 
lieve in Gulliver's Travels was an even greater 
I feat than that of convincing one that Robinson 
1 Crusoe really did keep his hold on the rock 
till the waves abated, land, build a hut, read 
the Bible to his parrot, make a hat out of goat- 
skins and see a cannibal's footprints on the 
sand. But Swift does it, and with the most 
I wonderfully cunning touches of verisimilitude. 
1 How pathetically true Gulliver's longing, when 
amongst the kindly giants of Brobdingnag, to 
be " among people with whom I could con- 
verse upon even terms, and walk about the 
streets and fields without fear of being trod to 

[141] 



LIFE AND LETTERS 

death like a frog or a young puppy " ; and still 
more that other flash: 

" I likewise broke my right shin against the 
shell of a snail, which I happened to stumble 
over, as I was walking alone, and thinking on 
poor England." 

But Defoe, outside straight narration, was 
clumsy. His satires are almost unreadable. 
Swift was a supreme ironist: he was as great 
at saying something by saying its opposite as 
he was at direct story-telling. That he should 
have chosen irony as his method of attacking 
abuses was natural. 

For he was, at bottom, a very reticent man. 
His friends had often to deduce his good heart 
from his good deeds, and even in the letters 
to Stella he usually keeps to the superficies of 
gossip and scandal. His anger was terrific 
when it broke out. The most amiable of men 
with his friends, there was a passion in him 
which men feared, something in him, it may 
be, he even feared himself; though it was to 
that he owed the concentrate force of expression 
which must have been his chief source of de- 
light. Vive la bagatelle is the motto (it was 
his) of a miserable man. Swift was a miserable 
man; but the causes of his misery, however 
[142] 



THE UTOPIAN SATIRIST 

obscure they may be, were not petty ones. 
Men are seldom great through being unhappy; 
Swift is almost unique in English literature in 
that his unhappiness was not the effect but 

I the source of his power. The " fierce indigna- 
tion " that, on his own statement, consumed 
him, had to manifest itself in grim jokes in- 
stead of exalted rhapsodies. At any rate, the 
ironical method became second nature to him. 
And it has delightful results in a small way as 
well as magnificent results in a large way. He 
was a master of under-statement. " Yesterday 
I saw a woman flayed, and you cannot imagine 
how it altered her appearance for the w^orse." 
The little incidental jests are scattered all 
over his minor controversial writings; and even 

;in the most necessary preface he took every 

I opportunity of gravely pulling the reader's, or 
even his own leg. One such he defended 
(speaking as one of " The JMultitude of writers, 
whereof the whole JMultitude of Writers most 

I reasonably complains ") on the ground that: 

" It makes a considerable Addition to the Bulk 
of the Volume, a Circumstance by no Means to 
be neglected by a skilful writer," 

I which is an extremely modern thought. " What- 
ever," he added, " word or sentence is printed 

[143] 



LIFE AND LETTERS 

in a different character, shall be judged to con- 
tain something extraordinary either of wit or 
sublime." He was, in his queer way, a dreamer; 
he was a master of English; a great realist; 
and a great wit. And if a man should still 
think he went too far in his exposure of the 
race of " little odious vermin," to which he be- 
longed, let him remember two things. One is 
that Swift projected a work entitled A Modest 
Defence of the Proceedings of tJie Rabble in 
All Ages. The other is Swift's own despairing 
reflection, that " there is not, through all Na- 
ture, another so callous and insensible a Member 
as the World's Posteriors, whether you apply to 
it the Toe or the Birch." 



[144] 



JANE AUSTEN'S CENTENARY 

Jane Austen died on July 18, 1817, at the 
age of forty-one. She began writing early; 
Pride and Prejudice^ a mature work, was fin- 
ished when she was twenty-one. But novel- 
i writing was, to her, in a sense a recreation, 
like another: and she left only four long books, 
two short ones, ancl two fragments. These 
mean so much to her admirers that one of them 
has seriously suggested that a man's worth can 
be estimated once and for all by his ability 
to appreciate her. She had a most " unevent- 
ful " hfe, and we know very little about it. Yet 
those who like her feel that they know her 
more intimately than any other writer. To those 
who have not read her, she is merely a woman 
with a name like a governess, who lived at the 
same period as Maria Edgeworth (another of 
the same sort) and wrote books with titles such 
as Emma and Sense and Sensibility, which 
stamp them as moral treatises of the worst and 
most edifying kind. But to those who know 

[145] 



LIFE AND LETTERS 

her she is unique, a delightful secret, a secret 
shared by thousands of people. 

Miss Austen lived — as an author — in greater 
seclusion perhaps than any other English 
writer. She knew no celebrities and corre- 
sponded with none: her name did not appear 
on her title-pages; and her fame did not be- 
come considerable until after her death. Dur- 
ing the last year or two of her life her books 
sold fairly well, and she received, with equa- 
nimity, two tokens of appreciation. The 
Quarterly published a considerable review of 
her work, and the Prince Regent's Librarian, 
writing on behalf of his illustrious employer, 
asked for the dedication of Emma. Miss 
Austen assented, and inscribed the book to 
the Regent: upon which the Librarian, en- 
couraged, wrote again, suggesting that the 
author's gifted pen might properly be em- 
ployed upon " an historical romance illustrative 
of the august House of Coburg," which was 
about to be united, by a holy bond, with the 
Royal House of England. It is not easy to 
persuade oneself that George IV. was Jane 
Austen's only point of contact with the great 
world: it is absolutely impossible to imagine 
what a German historical novel by her would 
have been like. She could not imagine it 

[146] 



JANE AUSTEN'S CENTENARY 

either: she explained to the Librarian that she 
could not undertake any story in which it would 
be improper to laugh. Treatises with a serious 
subject were not in her line. " I think," she 
said, " I may boast myself to be, with all pos- 
sible vanity, the most unlearned and uninformed 
female who ever dared to be an authoress." 

This is, of course, an exaggeration: and even 
had it been literally true at that date, she would 
have lost her proud pre-eminence ten thousand 
times over by now. She was fairly widely read 
in history and literature: and amongst her 
other accomplishments, as her nephew proudly 
relates, were embroidery of the most masterly 
kind, spillikins, and cup-and-ball, at which she 
once caught the ball a hundred times running. 
One would expect this: she was a human being 
before she was a woman of intellect: and her 
propensity for entering into the occupations 
and amusements of her circle is of a piece with 
her preference to write about the world she 
lived in rather than about the myriad worlds 
she did not live in. Her brain was good enough 
for anything, but she did not employ it in 
speculation or controversy or the promiscuous 
acquisition of facts. One remembers the educa- 
tion of the two Misses Bertram, who thjught 
themselves so superior to Fanny Price: 

[147] 



LIFE AND LETTERS 

" How long ago it is, aunt, since we used to 
repeat the chronological order of the Kings of 
England, with the dates of their accession, and 
most of the principal events of their reigns ! '* 

" Yes," added the other; " and of the Roman 
Emperors as low as Severus; besides a great 
deal of the human mythology, and all the 
metals, semi-metals, planets, and distinguished 
philosophers." 

There has been no critic so desperate as to 
suggest that she was the product of the French 
Revolution. Her complete detachment from 
the Great War, which raged throughout her 
writing career, has often been mentioned. She 
hoped her brothers or characters in the Navy 
might pick up a little prize-money: and there 
her interest ceased. She and her family and 
her neighbours and her heroines were in Chaw- 
ton or Meryton, Bath or Lyme Regis: and 
those arenas were quite large enough for the 
display of the general affections and particular 
idiosyncrasies of men and women. She limited 
her art still further: she dealt only with her own 
social class, and its outskirts. She must have 
known farmers and cottagers well enough: but 
they never appear as characters in her books. 
It is evident, therefore, that her limitations of 

[148] 



JANE AUSTEN'S CENTENARY 

subject were as much a matter of deliberate 
choice as of opportunity. The genteel families 
of a country town, the officers of a militia 
regiment, the local clergy, a great landlord or 
two, and a sprinkling of governesses and sailor 
sons on leave: these materials she found quite 
sufficient for her picture of life. 

England has had few such finished artists. 
There is only one conspicuous weakness in her 
books. It is not true that she could draw 
women, but not men: her subsidiary men are 
as good as her subsidiary women. But her 
heroes are shadowy and unsatisfactory com- 
pared with her heroines. All her novels were 
written from the heroine's standpoint. In 
P?ide and Prejudice the author may almost be 
said to look at the world through Elizabeth 
Bennet's eyes: in all the other books she is 
standing, as it were, at the side of her heroines. 
She knows them intimately: she never troubles 
to give us the inner history of the young men 
with whom they are in love. All the other per- 
sons around them are illuminated and made 
familiar by the lamp of comedy that is turned 
on them. This operation cannot be whole- 
heartedly performed on the young lovers; 
and even the most impressive of them, Mr. 
Knightley, and the nicest of them, Commander 

[149] 



LIFE AND LETTERS 

Wentworth, are rather vague and unexplored. 
We can deduce the rest of Mr. Bennet from 
what IMiss Austen shows us: Darcy's per- 
sonality has great blanks like the old maps of 
Africa. We have to assume that Darcy, since 
Miss Austen thought him worthy of Elizabeth 
Bennet, was an exceptionally fine man: but 
we know very little about him except that 
when the plot necessitates it he behaves like a 
pig, and when the plot necessitates it he behaves 
like a chivalrous gentleman. This weakness, 
however, is remarkably little inconvenience to 
the reader. We are prepared to take these 
young men at Miss Austen's valuation: the 
hearts of the women are quite sufficiently ex- 
posed to make the love-stories interesting; and 
in any case the love-affairs are not the only 
props of the books. Their first interest lies 
in the vision they give us of the everyday life 
of ordinary families, in the inexhaustible in- 
terest drawn from the apparently humdrum by 
a woman of genius. Her people are the people 
we know. The Georgian setting of harpsi- 
chords, muddy roads, Chippendale, hahas and 
Empire dresses, does not make them archaic: 
it merely makes clearer their permanent moder- 
nity, the endurance of types of character, of 
human " humours," impulses, small deceptions 
[ISO] 



JANE AUSTEN'S CENTENARY 

and generosities, and mannerisms of speech 
and gestm-e. There must have been Miss El- 
tons, Sir Walter Elliots and Miss Bateses in 
Athens: they must exist in Samarkand: and 
one might quite conceivably forget whether one 
had read about Mary Bennet and her mother 
in a book or met them at Cheltenham. There 
they all are, scores of them. We know little 
directly of their souls: nor do we of most 
people with whom we dine or drink tea. But 
few of them — Collins and Lady Catherine, one 
admits, are Dickens characters — are less real 
than our acquaintances. And, through Miss 
Austen, we get far more amusement out of 
them than we do out of our acquaintances. For 
Miss Austen had sharper eyes than we. 

Nobody has excelled her interiors, or in- 
vented such exquisite beginnings and endings. 
She gets one intrigued in the first sentence, yet 
without the least effort. And no great writer 
of English has kept his English up with so little 
apparent effort. The quiet tune of her sen- 
tences is never broken, yet never gets dull. She 
always uses the right word, yet never with 
the appearance of having searched for it, and 
the felicities of her humour are inexhaustible. 
" Mr. Knightley seemed to be trying not to 
smile; and succeeded, without difficulty, upon 



LIFE AND LETTERS 

Mrs. Elton's beginning to talk to him." They 
are usually as quiet as that: they produce warm 
flickering smiles as one passes. It is hopeless 
to attempt to illustrate them here: or to show 
how discriminating is her sarcasm and how 
sweet and sympathetic is the spirit underneath 
it. She was in the line of Addison and 
Goldsmith, uniting immense sense with great 
sensibility. Amid the tropical forest of the 
Romantic movement, she flourished, the most 
perfect flower of the eighteenth century. 



[152] 



MR. CONRAD'S MASTERPIECE 

Mr. Joseph Conrad is now admitted to be 
one of the greatest living writers in our lan- 
guage. It took him a long time to get his due 
from any but a small public. It is with some- 
thing of a shock that one reads that Lord Jim, 
of which Messrs. Dent have published a new 
six shilling edition, was written over twenty 
years ago, and appeared in book form in 1901. 
What were the masterpieces which, in that year, 
overshadowed it? Why was not Mr. Conrad at 
that stage recognised as the equal of Hardy 
and Meredith, whose names, bracketed together, 
used to appear in the reviews ad nauseam? I 
speak with the freedom of one who at that 
period was not a professional critic. 

Lord Jim is the story of a man's successful 
endeavour to rehabilitate himself. The book 
opens with his failure. With a few other white 
men he is taking a crowded pilgrim ship, the 
Fatna, across the Indian Ocean. On a per- 
fectly still moonlit night she strikes a derelict 
and her forward compartment, screened only 

[153] 



LIFE AND LETTERS 

by a rusty old bulkhead, is flooded. Only the 
officers know. All over the deck the half-naked 
pilgrims sleep, sighing and moaning in the heat. 
The German captain and three companions 
hurry off in a boat: and at the last moment 
Jim, undeliberately, automatically, jumps in 
after them. The ship, as it happens, does not 
go down; there is an enquiry, and the deserters 
have their certificates taken away. But to Jim 
the important thing is not this; it is the knowl- 
edge that he has failed to live up to the code; 
the loss of honour in other men's eyes and still 
more in his own; his unworthiness of his native 
civilisation and of the service. Wherever he 
goes, taking odd jobs in Asiatic ports, his story 
follows him; and once it has turned up, even 
though men are ready enough to palliate it, he 
vanishes. He goes always eastward, always 
hankering for a chance of confirming his con- 
viction that he is equal to the greatest calls 
that can be made upon him. And in the end, 
among savage Malays in the interior of an 
East Indian island, he gets satisfaction. He 
lives to know what it is to be absolutely trusted 
by men and dies celebrating a " pitiless wed- 
ding with a shadowy ideal of conduct." 

There is no need in a review to disclose the 
details of this story. But those who think 

[154] 



MR. CONRAD'S MASTERPIECE 

Lord Jim Mr. Conrad's greatest book will at 
least meet with no objection from the author, 
and INIr. Conrad's best is equal to the best of 
any other living man. As an achievement in 
construction, it is in the first rank. ]Mr. Con- 
rad's method is, as usual, bizarre. The story- 
is begun by the author; then taken up by his 
favourite narrator INIarlow, who, on an Eastern 
hotel verandah, tells what he has seen of Jim, 
and what he has picked up from others, to a 
chance group of men lying on cane chairs in 
the darkness, smoking and drinking; and it 
ends with documents, written by INIarlow and 
Jim, received by one of those listening men 
years afterwards, in a London flat. Each 
subsidiary contributor to the story is clearly 
described in his special digression, and there 
are constant side-stories. Yet the impression 
with which one finishes is one of unity, har- 
mony, perfect proportion. There are one or 
two minor flaws, but they are so insignificant 
as to be hardly worth mentioning. The digres- 
sions are not too long; the pains taken with 
characters only slightly connected with Jim are 
not wasted, as they always contribute to the 
picture of the background against which he 
lived and the world which played upon his feel- 
ings and thoughts. 

[iSS] 



LIFE AND LETTERS 

The book contains a large, if floating, popu- 
lation of portraits. No figure, save Jim's, goes 
the whole way through. The others come and 
go under the rays of the lamp which follows 
him from Aden to India, from Hongkong to 
the Moluccas; smart captains, drunken out- 
casts, ships'-chandlers, merchants, hotel-keepers; 
"Gentleman Brown," the pirate; Egstrom and 
Blake, the quarrelsome partners; Stein, the tall 
and studious old German trader, with his quiet 
house, his great tropical garden and his col- 
lection of butterflies; and the notabilities of 
Patusan, the cringing Rajah, the mean half- 
breed Cornelius, massive old Doramin, with his 
ponderous elbows held up by servants, the mys- 
terious and pathetic girl whom Jim marries, and 
Dain Waris, who reminds one of the noble 
young Malay in Almayefs Folly. Jim, him- 
self, always remains a little vague. Mr. Con- 
rad's preoccupation with his hero's dominant 
idea, as deduced from his actions by other 
people, resulted in Jim being inadequately dis- 
closed. But the more rapid portraits are all 
perfect. And in no book of Mr. Conrad's 
is a greater variety of scenes so surely sketched. 
There is little elaborate set description. The 
account of the pilgrim ship's voyage under the 
sun and moon across the flat ocean, " evenly 

[156] 



MR. CONRAD'S MASTERPIECE 

ahead, without a sway of her bare masts, cleav- 
ing continuously the great calm of the waters 
under the inaccessible serenity of the sky," is 
magnificently, almost intolerably vivid. But 
when the narrative comes nominally from Mar- 
low, the descriptions must be kept within bounds, 
lest the stretched illusion of speech should snap. 
Even so on almost every page some beautiful — 
and usually terribly beautiful — scene is bitten 
into one's mind, and the whole region of Patu- 
san, the town on piles, the interminable gloomy 
forest, the moon rising between a chasm in the 
hills, the muddy waters, the marshes, the stag- 
nant air, and the immense blue sea round the 
river's last bend, is pieced gradually together 
so that one remembers it as though oneself had 
been there. And it is all done in English of 
a grave music which, from one to whom our 
language is not native, is miraculous. 

I think, however, that the book's greatest 
quality is a moral one. Like the late Henry 
James, Mr. Conrad scarcely ever preaches, yet 
is in the best sense a didactic writer. He is 
capable of speculation about conduct: there is 
an immense amount of it behind this story. 
But he brings something else than curiosity and 
agility of intellect to the discussion. " Hang 
ideas! " exclaims Mar low, in a half -serious aside. 

[157] 



LIFE AND LETTERS 

" They are tramps, vagabonds knocking at the 
back-door of your mind, each taking a little 
of your substance, each carrying away some 
crumb of that belief in a few simple notions 
you must cling to if you want to die decently 
and would like to live easy." It is rather too 
stark a statement; but it is at least a half- 
truth. Take Jim's act of cowardice, for ex- 
ample. A good many of our modern moralists, 
with their mania for destroying the things by 
which men have lived well for countless genera- 
tions, would probably argue that he did right 
in jumping into the boat. The others had 
gone; the ship, as far as he knew, would in- 
fallibly sink; there was no earthly chance of his 
saving the panic-stricken passengers if he 
stayed; and in any case a man is not respon- 
sible for an automatic impulse. Other and 
darker men would even argue that, as the repre- 
sentative of a higher civilisation, a strong and 
enlightened man, Jim was even doing his duty 
to the world by escaping instead of sacrificing 
himself for the sake of a lot of besotted and 
dirty Moslems on their way to Mecca. Such 
arguments, though not until our own time have 
philosophies been constructed out of them, are 
not new. They are familiar to every man in 
the shape of inner promptings. We have all 

[158] 



MR. CONRAD'S MASTERPIECE 

lapsed; we all remember things we are ashamed 
of, cowardices which we cannot forget; and we 
are familiar enough with the voices which say, 
"What does it matter?" "To yourself you 
are the most important thing," " Forget it," 
" Why bother, since nobody knows," and, very 
subtly, "It is a man's first duty to be prudent." 
Circumstances made of Lord Jim, especially at 
the end, an extreme case. But all the same he 
was typical. A man's self-respect can only be 
restored in one way: by doing the second time 
what he has failed to do the first. A civilisa- 
tion in which men should spend their time pro- 
miscuously undermining traditional loves and 
loyalties by imperfect syllogisms would rot to 
pieces. If you believe this, even at the risk of 
encountering the last and supposedly worst 
charge of being a sentimentalist, you take the 
romantic view of life : and you will have Mr. 
Conrad on your side. His books, in spite of all 
the blood and thunder, both metaphorical and 
literal, that there is in them, in spite of the 
black skies behind their lightnings, and the 
brooding sense of evil that pervades his medita- 
tions, are an incitement to decent living. I 
do not know what his nominal religion is, or if 
he professes any; he is obviously perplexed and 
oppressed by the cruelty and pain of things. 

[■59] 



LIFE AND LETTERS 

But if he sees behind the world a pit " black as 
the night from pole to pole," he finds consola- 
tion not in the insane and pathetic assertion 
that he is master of his own Fate, but " in a 
few simple notions you must cling to," which 
the race, after some thousands of years of ex- 
perience, has discovered to be more effective. 



[i6o] 



FOUR PAPERS ON SHAKESPEARE 

I: Shakespeare's Workmanship 

What a pleasure it is to get a book on 
Shakespeare and know before you open it that 
it will be fresh, frank, and sensible, free at once 
from old fustian and from new fantasies, and 
certain to send you back to read your author 
with increased understanding and enjoyment! 
Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch's Shakespeare^ s 
Workmanship has all the merits of his previous 
works and the additional attraction of the great- 
est subject a literary critic can write about. 

Sir Arthur treats Shakespeare as a human 
artist, though the greatest: a man capable of 
indolence, wilful caprice, and occasional inepti- 
tude: an artist working, like others, under 
limitations, unwilling (as great artists are) to 
repeat old triumphs, always attacking new diffi- 
culties, and sometimes (as in that last group 
of plays which cover long periods of time and 
deal with slow spiritual processes) failing to 
surmount them. With so full a book before 

[i6i] 



LIFE AND LETTERS 

him the reviewer can do no more than quote 
and criticise a few things at random. Sir 
Arthur throws light on every play and on the 
principles of art in general; the study of 
" workmanship " gives him a very wide refer- 
ence with limits difficult to determine. He is 
extraordinarily good on Hamlet, in which he 
says, after all the wiseacres have dowered 
Shakespeare with all their philosophies and 
pathologies, there is no " mystery " whatever — 
except the slight unsolved and usually un- 
noticed mystery as to why the murdered king 
was succeeded by his brother, and not by his 
son. He notes in the Merchant of Venice how 
Shakespeare was handicapped by his ready- 
made and preposterous plots about the pound 
of flesh and the casket. They gave him little 
room for the natural development of character, 
he had to concentrate on Shylock or Portia. 
There ought, says Sir Arthur, " to be a close 
time " for the discussion of the Trial Scene. 

Discussing criticisms made against the weak- 
nesses and complexities of Cymbeline, he says, 
justly, that what Shakespeare did in that play 
was to create Imogen, the loveliest and noblest 
heroine in all literature; and that since he did 
so rare a thing we may assume that that is 
what he was chiefly trying to do. As You 

[162] 



SHAKESPEARE'S WORKMANSHIP 

Like It elicits the remark that it is " arguable 
of the greatest creative artists that, however 
they learn and improve, they are always trading 
on the stored memories of childhood." 

There is one play about which, exercising a 
reader's right with the utmost deference and 
diffidence, I dare to differ from Sir Arthur 
and from the majority of critics. I do not 
think Macbeth entirely comes off. Sir Arthur 
remarks, and this indisputable truth has been 
disastrously forgotten by many modern play- 
wrights, that whatever a " hero " is, does, or 
suffers, it is essential that he should command 
the sympathies of the audience. He sets forth 
all the case against INIacbeth, and adds that 
the great poetry which is put into his mouth 
" drapes him with the illusion of greatness," 
but that this is not enough, and that he is only 
saved by being represented as a victim of some 
fatal hallucination of undefined strength im- 
posed on him by evil supernatural powers. I 
thoroughly agree with Sir Arthur's attack on 
those who under-estimate the importance of the 
supernatural element in the play, and who fail 
to understand the spell that a stoiy like that of 
the witches on the blasted heath must exercise 
on all imaginative minds. I agree with his 
diagnosis of Shakespeare's problem here and 

[■63] 



LIFE AND LETTERS 

of the means he adopted to solve it. Where I 
differ from him is in holding, unlike him, that 
Shakespeare failed. There was, I think, a 
double failure. Easy though Shakespeare found 
it to write great speeches and impute them to 
any character, it was not so easy to convince us 
that that character really spoke them. The 
great imaginative passages spoken by Hamlet, 
by Prospero, and by the raving Lear, we can 
accept not as Shakespeare's, but as theirs: they 
spring directly from their intellects and emo- 
tions as we know them; they are more intense 
than their contexts, but all of a piece with 
them. These men have no need to be 
" draped " with the illusion of greatness, for 
they are great. With Macbeth it is different. 
When he says things like 

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools 
The way to dusty death 

the great language is a " drapery." It hangs 
loosely and awkwardly upon him; it does not 
belong to him; the greatness is Shakespeare's, 
and not his; the illusion is not produced. Mac- 
beth is not made great by the mere loan of 
a poet's imagery, and he is not made sympa- 
thetic, however adequately his crime may be 
explained and palliated, by being the victim of 
a hallucination. We might feel very deeply 

[164] 



SHAKESPEARE'S WORKMANSHIP 

with such a victim had he won our affection 
or admiration previous to his hallucination or 
were he, outside that, a fine fellow; but this 
man has never attracted us at all; and though 
any weak doomed man must arouse some 
measure of pity, our interest in Macbeth is 
nothing compared with that which we feel in 
Hamlet and Othello and Lear, and even less 
than that which is stirred by his inexcusable 
and unhallucinated, but tigerishly resolute, lady. 
The principal character in Macbeth, in fact, 
is dull; he makes no appeal; we do not greatly 
mind what happens to him; and the play, in 
spite of sublime scenes and poetry, is an illus- 
tration and a warning to artists who deny, or 
forget, that no powers of execution and no 
subordinate achievement can compensate for a 
central figure who is " unsympathetic," and 
that it is better for a " hero " to provoke active 
fear or hate than indifference or half-con- 
temptuous pity. It is no use having a hero 
who makes people feel, from first to last, that 
he wants a good shaking. The mistake was not 
one that Shakespeare usually made; but his plot 
beat him. The emotional hold of the play 
would have been immeasurably greater had he 
set Macbeth against an equally prominent but 
lovable character: given him, say, an innocent, 

[165] 



LIFE AND LETTERS 

horror-stricken wife instead of a fellow-mur- 
derer who is not only as incapable as he of 
drawing our affection, but who incidentally 
throws him into the shade as a criminal. 

The end of Othello — on which Sir Arthur 
barely touches — is a subtler matter; whether 
one thinks the workmanship fails depends upon 
whether one believes that the most noble and 
generous Othello, even though a Moor, and de- 
ceived, and mad with jealousy, really could 
have — did, in fact — kill his wife. Men in such 
situations, no doubt, have killed guiltless wives, 
and some of these men have possibly been 
strong and lovable people. But I, at least, 
experience when I come to that death, not 
those feelings which one has when a tragedy 
works to its inevitable and natural climax, but, 
mingled with sickening horror for poor little 
Desdemona, anger and irritation not against 
Othello, but against Shakespeare, who is direct- 
ing him. Sir Arthur, in his brief parenthesis 
on the play, quotes a lady as having shouted to 
Othello from the auditorium: " You great black 
fool; can't you see?'' What I feel like saying, 
and I can't think my impressions are unique, is 
not that, but : " Look here, Shakespeare, you'd 
no right to do this merely because, before you 
started, you decided that this was the way the 
[1 66] 



SHAKESPEARE'S WORKMANSHIP 

story should go. You know better. You're 
monkeying with human nature, and you've no 
excuse." 

Sir Arthur's readers must hope that he will 
supplement this volume with another covering — 
with whatever central theme — those plays which 
are not studied in this volume. There is one, 
I think, which really should have been here, the 
main characteristics of Shakespeare's technical 
aims and achievements being the subject. That 
play is Troilus and Cressida. Too little atten- 
tion has always been given to it; and those 
critics who have, at length, written about it have 
concentrated too much upon the love-story — 
drawing, incidentally, from this quite convinc- 
ing picture of a fickle girl and an embittered 
lover unjustifiable deductions about Shake- 
peare's frame of mind when he wrote it. 

The chief interest of the play, and certainly 
its chief interest as a piece of " workmanship," 
seems to me to lie in its vividness as a pano- 
rama, as a series of suddenly illuminated scenes 
in which many characters, Greek and Trojan, 
live and move, each with his distinct face and 
opinions and temper. It resembles one of those 
bright and crowded " compartment " pictures 
that the early Flemings painted. If both 
Troilus and Cressida were left out, the siege of 

[167] 



LIFE AND LETTERS 

Troy, in sections, would remain; and I cannot 
think (and I am sure Sir Arthur would not 
think) that in making that great tapestry- 
Shakespeare did not know what he was doing, 
and know that, in drama, it was a novel and 
difficult thing. 

II : The Blackamoor 

In the last paper I made some remarks about 
Othello. I will not inflict a literal repetition 
of these upon my readers (if, as the modest 
editor said, any such there be), but the gist 
of them was that the end of the play was not 
convincing. I argued that, although some men 
might kill their wives out of jealousy, the 
Othello whom we have got to know in the play, 
passionate though he is, would not have done 
it. All round, it is not an inevitable, but a 
forced — even a faked — ending, however this 
may be disguised by the verisimilitude of Shake- 
speare's detail and the natural splendours of his 
language. I had never examined the sources of 
the play, but I thought that probably the plot 
as Shakespeare found it hampered him: that 
Othello murdered his wife " in the original," 
and that the dramatist made him do it in his 
play in spite of the fact that as the play de- 
veloped Othello's character grew into something 
[i68] 



THE BLACKAMOOR 

quite unlike that of the murderer. I have now 
looked up the original, and find confirmation 
of the theory. 

The story is taken from a collection of fables 
(Hecatommithi) by Giovanbattista Giraldi, 
called Cinthio, who was a University professor 
at Ferrara, and published his book in 1565. 
Each tale was supposed to illustrate a moral 
virtue, but which virtue was illustrated by 
the story of Othello my informant (the Yale 
Shakespeare) sayeth not. The book was not 
translated into English, so far as we know; 
the conclusion being (we are used to these 
puzzling deductions about Shakespeare) that 
either Shakespeare knew Italian, French, or 
Spanish, or else he heard the story at second 
hand. In Cinthio's tale, " Disdemona " is the 
only person with a name. Othello is " the 
Moor"; lago is "the Ensign"; Cassio, "the 
Captain"; Emilia, "the Ensign's wife"; and 
Bianca, " a courtesan." Disdemona, against her 
parents' wishes, marries the valiant Moorish 
general, and insists on going with him to 
Cyprus. Mark what follows. lago falls in 
love with Disdemona, who is attached to lago's 
wife. Failing to seduce her, lago ascribes his 
failure to Cassio. Cassio gets into disgrace 
for striking a soldier; Disdemona intercedes 

[169] 



LIFE AND LETTEPvS 

for him, and this gives lago his cue. He tells 
Othello that Disdemona is in love with Cassio 
and " has taken an aversion to your blackness." 
The handkerchief plot is developed, and the 
]Moor, convinced, " fell to meditating how he 
should put his wife to death, and likewise the 
Captain, so that their death should not he laid 
to his charge." 

Then, lago and Othello together " consulted 
of one means and another " — poison and dag- 
gers — to kill Disdemona, but could come 
to no conclusion. At last the ingenious Ensign 
said : " A plan comes to my mind, which will 
give 3^ou satisfaction and raise cause for no 
suspicion. It is this: the house in which you 
live is very old, and the ceiling of j^our chamber 
has many cracks; I propose we take a stocking 
filled with sand, and beat Disdemona with it till 
she dies; thus wiU her body bear no signs of 
violence. When she is dead we can pull down a 
portion of the ceiling, and thus make it seem as 
if a rafter falhng on her head had killed the 
lady. Suspicion cannot rest on you, since all 
men v/ill impute her death to accident." The 
JMoor was pleased with this advice, and accepted 
it. One night, when he and Disdemona were 
in bed, the Ensign, who had been concealed in 
a closet opening into the chamber, made a noise, 
[170] 



THE BLACKAMOOR 

according to plan. The Moor said to his wife: 
"Did you not hear that noise?" 

" Indeed, I heard it," she replied. 

" Rise/' said the Moor, " and see what 'tis." 

Disdemona got out of bed, and as she ap- 
proached the closet the other villain rushed out 
" and beat her cruelly with the bag of sand 
across her back, upon which Disdemona fell to 
the ground, scarcely able to draw her breath " ; 
but with the little voice she had left, she called 
upon the J^Ioor for aid. But the Moor, leaping 
from the bed, exclaimed: "Thou wickedest of 
women, thus has thy falseness found its just re- 
ward." The poor lady protests her innocence, 
but lago keeps pounding her until she is sense- 
less. The two men then lay her on the bed, 
wound her on the head, and pull down the ceiling 
of the room. Then the INIoor shouts that the 
house is falling down, and the neighbours come 
running in to find Disdemona dead under a 
rafter. The two murderers escape suspicion at 
the time. Othello gets to hate lago, fears to 
kill him, but disgraces him. lago then tells 
Cassio about the crime, and both murderers come 
ultimately to bad ends. " Thus did Heaven 
avenge the innocence of Disdemona " — and 
demonstrate, as I suppose the Italian moralist 

[■71] 



LIFE AND LETTERS 

contends, that it is unwise and unsafe to mur- 
der one's wife. 

This plot, accepted as Shakespeare's chief 
source, illuminates three remarkable things. 
The first is Shakespeare's genius for clothing 
bare bones; the second is his wonderful sense 
for noticing weaknesses in his originals, and 
remedying them; and the third is his occasional 
failure (as I choose to think it) to let that 
sense guide him all the way. He saw that 
Cinthio's Othello was quite impossible as a hero. 
He could not be kept on that footing with 
lago; the disgustingly calculated confederate 
murder was impossible; Othello could not, if 
he was to obtain any sympathy, be the sort of 
man who would survive and indulge in recrimi- 
nations with a blackmailing accomplice. Turn 
to the death-scene in the play : 

It is the cause, it is the cause, my soul; 

Let me not name it to you, you chaste stars ! 

It is the cause. Yet I'll not shed her blood 

Nor scar that whiter skin of hers than snow. 

And smooth as monumental alabaster. 

Yet she must die, else she'll betray more men. 

Put out the light, and then put out the light: 

If I quench thee, thou flaming minister, 

I can again thy former light restore, 

Should I repent me ; but once put out thy light. 

Thou cunning'st pattern of excelling nature, 

[172] 



THE BLACKAMOOR 

I know not where is that Promethean keat 
That can thy light relume. 

So to the most beautiful and awful dialogue, 
the greatest dialogue in Shakespeare, and its 
close "But while I say one prayer!" "It is 
too late." That is what takes the place of 
Cinthio's abomination. Cinthio was scrapped. 
Othello's character was remade. He grew, 
under Shakespeare's hands, one of the noblest 
and most generous of men, a husband worthy 
of his wife. But he grew too noble and gen- 
erous, and though Shakespeare used all the 
resources of his incomparable art to palliate 
and explain the crime, though the murder in 
the play is committed by a demented man whose 
reason has temporarily been destroyed by the 
breaking of his ideal, and who immediately 
afterv/ards kills himself in remorse: 

I kiss'd thee ere I kill'd thee ; no way but this. 
Killing myself to die upon a kiss, 

he did not succeed in making us feel that the 
thing, granted the characters, had to happen. 
Othello, I am heretic enough to think, should 
have ended happily, and been grouped with 
the " Comedies." But though Shakespeare took 
every sort of liberty with what, when he found 
it, was little more than a crude anecdote, it 

[173] 



LIFE AND LETTERS 

did not occur to him, or he did not choose, to 
alter the end, which — when he first began the 
play — was no doubt the thing which, by its 
dramatic possibilities, attracted him and towards 
which he was all the time working up. 

It is one more illustration of Sir Arthur 
Quiller-Couch's theory that Shakespeare was 
occasionally hampered by his plots. Sir Ar- 
thur's own chief illustration is drawn from the 
Merchant of Venice, where the silly arrange- 
ments about the caskets and the pound of 
flesh — which would never have sprung from the 
imagination of a Shakespeare, but were indo-| 
lently retained since they were found in his 
original — hampered him badly, crippled his 
characterisation, and compelled him to con- 
centrate upon a few persons and a few scenes 
for his really great effects. The conclusion is 
that, like Homer, Shakespeare sometimes nods: 
an admission that need not be left to those 
iconoclasts who, not knowing the greatest plays 
and the greatest poetry in the world when they 
see them, spend their time attempting to con- 
vince people that the general reverence for 
Shakespeare is absurd and that his plays are 
no better than anyone else's. The late Tolstoy 
was one of these. 

[174] ' 



HAMLET 

III: Hamlet 

Mr. J. M. Robertson will not, I hope, be 
again returned to Parliament, if election would 
mean the interruption of the work he is doing 
upon Shakespeare. He proposes a general sur- 
vey of " The Canon of Shakespeare "; his books 
on Titus Andronicus and Shakespeare and 
Chapman were instalments of it; and a third 
fragment is his book The Problem of Hamlet, 
published by Allen and Unwin. 

He begins with a summary of the views 
expressed by previous scholars. The aesthetic 
problem has been discussed for two centuries, 
in England and Germany especially, " latterly 
with the constant preoccupation of finding a 
formula which shall reduce the play to aesthetic 
consistency." Inconsistencies have been found 
in Hamlet's character and actions; weaknesses 
in some passages which in other passages do 
not appear. But " every solution in turn does 
but ignore some of the data which motived 
the other." One " subjective school " concen- 
itrating on Hamlet's character as though he 
were a real person all of whose words were 
actually spoken, call him mad, or vacillating, 
or the slave of sensibility, or " the victim of an 
excess of the reflective faculty which unfits 

[175] 



LIFE AND LETTERS 

him for action." The obvious retort is that he 
is reckless of his life and frequently prompt 
in action. Why, then, it is answered, does he 
delay his mission? He does not, is the reply; 
but the counter-reply is that he is certainly felt 
to do so and that on the stage far too long 
a period seems to elapse. Another school here 
interposes. There was no weakness in Hamlet, 
but there were material difficulties in his way: 
the King was always surrounded by his guards 
and could not be got at. Of this, however, 
there is no evidence, and many bewildered 
persons have finally fallen on the comfortable 
bosom of the theory that Hamlet was mad and 
that therefore nothing he did or said is neces- 
sarily explicable or (on that assumption) in 
the least inexplicable. The reply to this is that 
Hamlet was obviously not mad, that we take 
a painful interest in all he thinks; and that 
Shakespeare was not so mad as to write a play 
the central figure of which was throughout all 
the acts puzzling an audience by speeches and 
deeds which had no cohesion and leading them 
to take seriously ruminations which were merely 
ravings. At all events, save amongst those who 
pity him as a maniac, Hamlet has few friends. 
They rebuke his weakness, and " for not kill- 
ing Claudius either at the start or in the 

[176] 



HAMLET 

praying-scene, Hamlet has been the theme of a 
hundred denunciations by zealous moralists." 

Of recent years there has been a general 
tendency to examine the texts historically; we 
have grown conscious of faults in the dramatist 
as dramatist; faults of idleness (if the word 
can be used of one so productive) ; faults aris- 
ing from lack of knowledge and time, from 
fatigue, from consideration of his audience, and 
above all — though this overlaps with the first — 
faults arising from the material he was using. 
He took his plots secondhand; the crude action 
and characterisation of the moulds frequently 
failed to suit what he poured into them. Othello 
is one instance; the Merchant of Venice is an- 
other; Hamlet is a third. There was an original 
barbaric story; there was a play (probably by 
Kyd) of which Mr. Robertson believes the Ger- 
man Brudermord to have been an adaptation. 
Shakespeare's Hamlet was based on Kyd's; 
incidents which are excrescences on it (this is 
the theme Mr. Robertson develops with great 
acumen, though he sometimes forces the pace) 
derive from Kyd's play; and the contradictions 
are due to Shakespeare's having failed to elimi- 
nate stock elements in the story which he had 
inherited. I think Mr. Robertson sometimes 
goes too far ; Shakespeare may have " taken 



LIFE AND LETTERS 

on " the feigned madness, but I don't think he 
failed to make it consistent with our Hamlet. 
In fact, though much that Mr. Robertson says 
is convincing, and Shakespeare did undoubtedly 
fail to produce a thoroughly coherent work of 
art, I don't find that there is really much that 
clashes with his hero and his " pessimism " and 
introspection. 

Even as the play stands, and granted that 
Shakespeare was to some extent impeded by 
an inherited plot and the crude characterisa- 
tion of Kyd or another, are its inconsistencies 
so very hard to swallow? Read the play as 
Shakespeare finally left it, see it acted uncut; 
and, whatever minor stumbling-blocks there 
may be in the text, whatever outcrops of a lower 
deposit that Shakespeare had not bothered to 
remove, does there not remain dominant a con- 
vincing character, a person Hamlet? Is he not 
as nearly complete, as positive and as nearly 
like a living being as any character in a fic- 
tion can be? Should we not know him if we 
met him, " larger than human " though he is? 
Do we find it so easy to define in a phrase the 
characters of our own friends that we should 
expect to "reduce him" (as the phrase has 
gone) to a " fixed and settled principle "? His 
action may seem inconsequent and his words 

[178]" 



HAMLET 

wild, but is there really any difficulty about 
what have commonly been supposed to be the 
larger stumbling blocks? To me the brooding 
Hamlet of the soliloquies is not intrinsically 
incompatible with the Hamlet who is a good 
soldier, and a master of fence, who lunges at 
Polonius through the arras, leaps recklessly into 
Ophelia's grave, sends his warders to their death, 
and boards the pirate ship single-handed. It is 
one thing to attack a pirate when you see one 
or to pink an eavesdropper; but even a man 
constitutionally fearless and, when issues are 
clear, very prompt in action, might well shrink 
from murdering his uncle in cold blood. Mr. 
Robertson quite properly asks whether all the 
professors who rebuke Hamlet for vacillation 
in that he missed an early chance of killing 
his uncle would themselves without hesitation 
have stabbed a man in the back whilst he was 
saying his prayers, however incestuous a beast 
he may have been. Even looking at the mattter 
from their own point of view, treating Hamlet 
as a real person, " not Shakespeare's creation 
but God's," those who have argued in so many 
volumes about Hamlet's weakness of will 
(largely on the strength of his own distraught 
self-questionings) show a deplorable lack of 
! imagination. And it is lack of imagination that 

[179] 



LIFE AND LETTERS 

accounts for the endless discussions as to whetherj 
Hamlet was mad: that is to say, whether cer- 
tain of the actions imputed to Shakespeare'sj 
Hamlet are inconceivable as the actions of a| 
sane man, such as ourselves. Do they knowl 
what a highly-strung man is, or what horror is?! 
He shams lunacy with Polonius; he is brutalj 
to Ophelia. Reader, have you never, when over- 
wrought, said cruel and unjust things to some- 
body you loved; have you never, at moments ofi 
great suffering or mental irritation, stopped on] 
the tip of your tongue words even brutaller! 
and beastlier, which have surged up in a hot I 
wave against the barrier of your normal sense? I 
Suppose it were your mother who had married j 
your father's murderer; suppose the revelation 
of the crime had come to you suddenly and youj 
were charged (for the ghost is there and real) 
to avenge it. Suppose, in spite of your con- 
viction, that you still wanted some last con- 
firmatory evidence and that, whilst you awaited, 
you were racked by thoughts of all the evil in 
the world and the impossibility of abolishing 
a crime by revenge, or of ever quieting yourj 
pain again. Suppose, nevertheless, that you 
were set on killing the beast and had to secure 
a certain opportunity. You might retain, as a 
rule, your self-command; be capable of attend- 

[1 80] 



HAMLET 

ing to business when necessary, or acting on 
sudden emergencies; have quiet intervals. But 
might you not — especially as you would prob- 
ably be unable to sleep (a thing of which there 
may be a hint in the " To be or not to be " 
speech) — be liable to excesses of violent temper, 
of distracted bitter talk? Dying, Shakespeare's 
Hamlet restrained Horatio from suicide with 
the appeal: 

O good Horatio, what a wounded name. 

Things standing thus unknown, shall live behind me. 

If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart 

Absent thee from felicity awhile, 

And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain 

To tell my story. 

So saying, and in his last moments making a 
clear political arrangement with that decision 
which was characteristic of him when faced 
by simple situations, he *' crack'd his noble 
heart." But his appeal, though Horatio doubt- 
less responded to it, has fallen on deaf ears 
elsewhere; and it is his eternal fate to be called 
a coward by bookworms, and a lunatic by the 
dull, who have never grasped the fact that 
others besides lunatics are " of imagination all 
compact." He has been as unfortunate in his 
death as in his life. 

[i8i] 



LIFE AND LETTERS 

IV: Shakespeare's Sonnets 

It is twenty years since Messrs. Methuen, with 
Mr. W. J. Craig as editor, began the publica- 
tion of the Arden Shakespeare ; ten since Mr. R. 
H. Case took over general control of the series; 
and, I should think, at least two since a volume 
was issued. Mr. C. Knox Pooler's edition of 
the Sonnets has at last appeared. It is a good 
edition. 

The notes are considerably more voluminous 
than the text. This is not always a merit in a 
poet's editor; and it necessitates an arrange- 
ment of the page which makes the edition an 
inconvenient one for ordinary reading. At the 
same time, a m^an who should habitually read 
the Sonnets without an occasional hankering 
for a fully annotated edition, would be more 
than human. Both their nature and their con- 
dition make them cry out for explanation. They 
appear to tell a story; but what story? They 
are evidently a sonnet sequence; we have the 
sonnets, but almost certainly not the sequence. 
They are dedicated by the printer to a mys- 
terious person whose identification might or 
might not provide a clue which would illuminate 
their whole content. They are full of phrases 
which need explanation, and words which open 

[182] 



SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS 

the door to conjectui-e; the originals of the 
greater portion of our text are two evidently- 
corrupt editions. One of these editions was 
published, apparently by a pirate, in Shake- 
speare's lifetime; the other by an ignoramus 
twenty-four years after his death. On all sides 
we are besieged by questions. For whom did 
Shakespeare write them? Are the whole of 
them meant to hang together? Where does 
euphuistic compliment end and passion begin? 
Who were the persons mentioned, including the 
brother-poet? Which of the thousands of vari- 
ant readings are correct? What is the correct 
order? And even — though this is not commonly 
put — do we possess the whole of them? 

Mr. Pooler is an editor of the cautious and 
judicious type. His notes on the text — inter- 
pretations, variants, parallel passage — embody 
a great deal of what is valuable in the work of 
his predecessors, and much, uniformly sensible, 
that is his own. On more general questions, 
however, he inclines to summarise the arguments 
of two centuries of commentators instead of 
parading theories of his own. One positive and 
exhaustive argument he does carry through, as 
I think, successfully. He argues, as against 
Sir Sidney Lee, that Benson for his edition of 
1640 had no other materials than Thorpe's 1609 

[183] 



LIFE AND LETTERS 

edition and The Passionate Pilgrim (1599), 
which contains two sonnets. Prima facie, there; 
is a good deal in favour of Sir Sidney Lee's i 
view: Benson leaves out some sonnets, mis-| 
describes many in head-lines, muddles them up 
with other poems, and frequently varies the text. ' 
But most of his exploits can be explained away 
as the stupidities of a dolt or the deliberate 
changes of a knave. Premising that " one blind 
beast may avoid the hole into which another 
blind beast has fallen, but it cannot fall into 
the same hole unless it is going over the same 
ground," Mr. Pooler collects a very large num- 
ber of instances to show that, where Thorpe had 
committed misprints or errors of punctuation 
which play havoc with the sense, Benson contin- 
ually follows him. This is not what is called a 
** mere " bibliographical question. For in Ben- 
son's edition, to put it briefly, a great many of 
the " he's " are altered into " she's," and if it 
could be proved to be anything more than a | 
mere adaptation of Thorpe's, the sex of the per- 
son addressed in most of the Sonnets would be 
more open to doubt than it is. 

The theory that the Sonnets do not refer to 
actual occurrences, often propounded (and re- 
cently supported, by the way, by Mr. Asquith ) , 
does not seem to me tenable; I do not think 

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SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS 

that a poet whose own personal feelings were 
not directly engaged ever produced sonnets 
with the ring that these have. There is no 
justification, on the face of the poet's statements 
or in the general spirit which permeates the son- 
nets, for those interpreters who, sometimes from 
interested motives, have detected abnormality in 
Shakespeare's love for that friend of whom he 
said: 

And for a woman wert thou first created 
Till Nature, as she wrought thee, fell a-doting 
And by addition me of thee defeated. . . . 

But he existed; Shakespeare urged him con- 
stantly to marry; and there was a breach. In 
spite of all the fever of all the controversial- 
ists, we do not know who he was. We do not 
even know whether his initials were W. H.; 
Sir Sidney Lee thinks that " W. H." was a 
seedy hanger-on of the publishing trade. Wheth- 
er the " Dark Lady " has ever been identified 
with Anne Hathaway, Mr. Pooler does not say, 
and I do not know. But there are several can- 
didates for her post, and at least six for that of 
the " rival poet." The amount of incidental in- 
formation brought to light by all their support- 
ers has been enormous; even Baconian research 
has a silver lining. But nothing near proof has 
ever been produced. The " Dark Lady " re- 

[i8s] 



LIFE AND LETTERS 

mains in the dark, and under " W. H.'s " dedi- 
cation, as under Junius' title, the motto ^"^ Stat 
nominis umbra ^' must still be written. 

Possibly the mystery will never be solved. 
But even if it were, a greater mystery remains, 
and one that envelopes the Plays as well as the 
Sonnets. It is the greatest of all Shakespearean 
mysteries; far greater than the mystery, so ob- 
sessing to the Baconians, of how " the drunken 
illiterate clown of Stratford " could have known 
so much law, grammar, and classical mythology. 
Why was the greatest of all poets so seemingly 
careless about the perpetuation of his texts; 
why did he apparently take no steps to get the 
bulk of his work published or even to correct 
the corrupt versions that did get published? 
Why, in an age when everybody rushed into 
print, did he leave his manuscripts about to die 
or precariously survive like foundlings? In any 
case, had he never said a word about his art 
himself, this would have been inexplicable, in 
the light of what we know of human nature and 
the nature of poets. But, apart from that, there 
is plenty of quite indisputable detailed evidence 
that he who envied " this man's art and that 
man's scope," and who spoke of the " proud full 
sail " of a rival's " great verse " revered his own 
calling^. More, over and over again, in the Son- 
[.86] 



SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS 

nets themselves he not only shows that con- 
sciousness of his own powers which great poets 
always have, but definitely anticipates the dura- 
bility of what he has written. He never says 
that he is writing for his private amusement 
or relief and that he does not care what becomes 
of his work or whether anyone ever reads it: 
though that is the attitude that some critics, 
anxious not to admit any puzzle insoluble, have 
absurdly imputed to him. What he says is: 

Not marble, nor the gilded monuments 
Of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme; 
But you shall shine more bright in these contents 
Than unswept stone, besmear'd with sluttish time: 
When wasteful war shall statues overturn, 
And broils root out the work of masonry, 
Nor ]\fars his word not War's quick fire shall burn 
The living record of your memory. 
'Gainst death and all oblivious enmity 
Shall you pace forth ; your praise shall still find room, 
Even in the eyes of all posterity 
That wear this world out to the ending doom. 
So, till the judgment that yourself arise, 
You live in this, and dwell in lovers' eyes. 

"Who will believe my verse in time to come?" 
he asks again. " Do thy most, old Time," he 
says. " My love shall in my verse ever live 
long." '' To times in hope my verse shall stand. 
Praising thy worth " : 

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LIFE AND LETTERS 

Your monument shall be my gentle verse, 
Which eyes not yet created shall o'er read; 
And tongues to be your being shall rehearse. 
When all the breathers of this world are dead; 
You still shall live, such virtue hath my pen. 
Where breath most breathes, even in the mouths of men. 

And where he is not promising, but hoping, we 
see the confidence behind the hope, as in that 
sonnet with the marvellous beginning: 

Since brass nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea, 
But sad mortality o'ersways their power, 
How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea, 
Wihose action is no stronger than a flower? 

He had written in some of these sonnets the 
greatest lyric verse in the world, and he knew 
it ; verse which in its effortless fertility of image, 
its " inevitable " directness of phrase, its per- 
fection of rhythm, must be the idol and the de- 
spair of every writer who reads it and sees 
Shakespeare doing a thousand times " on his 
head " what he himself would be proud to do 
once. There are contorted sonnets; there are 
even dull ones; but the best, and the best parts 
of the others surpass anything in English poetry. 
And they were, apparently, the by-product of 
a voluminous professional dramatist. 



[1 88] 



THE GREAT UNFINISHED 

It is announced that the late William de Mor- 
gan, who became a good, a successful and a 
voluminous novelist at an age when most men 
are content to narrate their reminiscences from 
a chair, left two unfinished novels behind him. 
One lacked only the last chapter ; the other much 
more. His notes for the missing parts were in 
existence, and with the aid of these his widow 
(who had just finished the work when she died) 
completed the books. 

De Morgan's admirers will await the results 
with curiosity. Cases are not uncommon in 
which husband and wife acquire similar habits 
of style and even similar physiognomies; and 
every congenial couple with alert minds develop 
in time a communal sense of humour. Each 
party sees humour in the same situations and 
responds to them in the same phrases; after 
many years, in fact, words cease to be necessary, 
and the simultaneous joke is flashed from eye 
to eye. But De Morgan's characterisation was 
so odd and his method of writing so extremely 

[189] 



LIFE AND LETTERS 

personal that I cannot conceive that there will 
not, however faithfully his ideas are followed 
up, be very marked joins where his script ends 
and Mrs. de Morgan's begins. But I do not 
seriously expect, unless the novels were early 
ones, that we shall feel much regret that they 
were never finished by their author. The age at 
which he started writing was an advantage to 
him one way: his first books had the benefit 
of a long and diverse experience; accumulated 
observations poured opulently forth. But every- 
thing went into them; he was looking backward 
and not forward; and his later books contained 
nothing worth having that was not in Somehow 
Good and Joseph Vance, and were far below 
them in quality. 

There is nothing unusual about unfinished 
books. Our literature is strewn with them, 
from Chaucer's translation of the Romance of 
the Rose to Henry James's two delicious and 
tantalising fragments. Many of the greatest 
works in literature were never finished. We 
have only a half of the Faerie Queene that 
Spenser planned. Virgil — which is not sur- 
prising since he thought he had done a good 
day's work if he had written twelve lines — did 
not complete the JEneid. Byron's Don Juan 
leaves off at a situation as teasing to the reader 
[190] 



THE GREAT UNFINISHED 

as it was certainly awkward for the characters; 
and his Childe Harold was never completed by 
him, though there exists a French continuation 
by the versatile Lamartine. Keats's Hyperion, 
his greatest poem, is no more than the torso of 
a Titan, and we lost something very great in 
the missing part of Shelley's Triumph of Life. 
Wordsworth's Excursion is incomplete; of Ma- 
caulay's History we have but the introduction 
and the first full-length section, and we may 
never get such a history of Anne's reign as the 
most vivid of social historians would have writ- 
ten. Dostoieffsky's Brothers Karamazoff, long 
as it is, was not finished; that few people know 
this is probably accounted for by the fact that 
few people have got through it. Jane Austen 
left two unfinished novels; and the list might 
be extended. But it is not very often that any- 
one has the courage to complete the unfinished 
work of a good writer. It is done occasionally. 
I myself, most inexperienced and reluctant of 
novelists, have lately received the sacred charge 
of finishing a work of fiction should its author 
(who, I am sure, will survive me by many 
years) die before he has come to the end of it. 
Marlowe's Hero and Leander, perhaps the 
loveliest poem in couplets in the language, was 
continued by Chapman, with results that did not 

[191] 



LIFE AND LETTERS 

justify the enterprise. Peter Motteux tried and 
failed to keep up to that unparalleled level of 
creative translation that Sir Thomas Urquhart 
had reached in the early books of Rabelais. A 
play of Meredith's was licked into final shape 
by (I hope my memory is not at fault) Sir 
James Barrie, and " Q," who was unfortunate 
in having one of Stevenson's duller books to 
cope with, finished St. Ives. Nobody, I think, 
has dared attempt an end to Weir of Hermis- 
ton, an enterprise only less formidable than 
would be that of rounding off a novel by Miss 
Austen. I am not sorry that these works are 
left as they were. But I do wish that some- 
body, anybody, Mrs. Dickens, Miss Dickens, 
Master Dickens, or Wilkie Collins, had finished 
Edwin Drood, for then we should have been 
spared this eternal controversy. 

It breaks out yearly like prairie fires; you 
may not notice where it starts, but at more or 
less regular intervals you are suddenly aware 
that the air is filled with smoke and flames. 
They are at it now, for the ninety-ninth time, 
in the Times Literary Supplement; next time 
it may be in the Saturday Review, or the 
Athenceum, or the Daily Mail, or all of them 
at once. There seem to be tens of thousands 
of persons in this country who worry over the 
[192] 



THE GREAT UNFINISHED 

Drood problem as chess enthusiasts do over 
mates in five moves. And the extraordinary 
thing is that they have a way of talking about 
the mystery of Drood and his latter end as 
though they were talking about something that 
really happened. 

Now I do not see why men should not amuse 
themselves by trying to elucidate a real mys- 
tery. Researches and disputations may then end 
in discovery. It is a comprehensible pastime to 
attempt to identify the Man in the Iron Mask 
or to try to demonstrate that Sir Philip Francis 
did or did not write the Letters of Junius. 
Somebody wrote the letters of Junius: they 
exist; new evidence or fresh examination of old 
evidence may (though I don't think it will) 
conclusively prove who was the author of those 
topical polemics, the literary merits of which we 
are all agreed in so grossly exaggerating. There 
are still people who think there was something 
more than William Sharp behind Fiona Mac- 
leod. There are still those who think that Dr. 
Johnson, when he said that he " would not be 
deterred from detecting a cheat by the menaces 
of a ruffian," did not say the last word on the 
Gaelic origins of Macpherson's Ossian. They 
are welcome to their opinions, and they are en- 
titled to wish for something concrete to support 

[193] 



LIFE AND LETTERS 

them. But it is a totally different thing to 
dispute about who did what and what happened 
to whom in an uncompleted story which is not 
a history but fiction. The common-sense posi- 
tion is that nothing whatever happened to Edwin 
Drood, that he himself and all his confreres were 
the acme of inactivity; for the simple reason 
that there were ( in the highly appropriate words 
of their own fabulist) no sich persons. 

It is of course a great tribute to Dickens's 
hypnotic power over the simple-minded that he 
should have been able to persuade people that 
his characters were actual men and women of 
whom he merely chronicled some of the words 
and deeds. And it is an immense compliment 
to his literary craftsmanship that even men who 
do not forget that Drood and Company were 
fictitious, assume that his art was so perfect and 
the relation between cause and effect in his 
works so precise that, given a set of characters 
and a set of circumstances provided by him, one 
should be able infallibly to deduce what remains 
undisclosed from what the novelist, who is as 
true to nature as Nature herself, has revealed. 
But I don't think that even Dickens's literary 
craftsmanship can deserve so high a compliment 
as all that. 'Not does Dickens's literary con- 
science. Even if words of his were produced giv- 
[194] 



THE GREAT UNFINISHED 

ing such and such an explanation of the problem 
and the mystery, and such and such a sketch of 
the end of the book, I should not take those words 
as gospel. For he was not so perfect a crafts- 
man (who is?) as to leave himself no two ways 
out of a situation, and his conscience was not 
so relentless as to prevent him from producing 
the most unlikely effects from his causes, if 
whim or expediency made him feel inclined so 
to do. He was demonstrably not above faking 
a most improbable last act to a novel in order 
to gratify the sentiment of the public. And I 
refuse to believe that he, who could make almost 
any character do almost anything, disguise al- 
most any man as some other man, resurrect the 
dead and transform the living, would not have 
found some way out of his situation which no 
man will discover by sitting down and exam- 
ining a fragment. The problem of a novelist's 
plot is not like a chess problem. There is no 
mathematical limit to the novelist's solution, and 
the novelist has no rules to obey; at least if 
there are rules he very seldom obeys them. 



[I9S] 



WALT WHITMAN 

A Japanese, who happened to be visiting 
England this month (July, 1919), might well 
think that one of the most established, popular, 
and closely read of modern authors was Walt 
Whitman. He would be wrong. The fact that 
Whitman's centenary has just occurred has led 
all the critics to write articles about him; but I 
suspect that it is years since most of them even 
mentioned his name. He is there all right — 
on his shelf, classified and ticketed, in case he 
should be wanted — recognised as one of the 
most interesting figures in American history; 
but I doubt if he is currently read anything 
like as much as he was ten or fifteen years ago. 
Most educated men, no doubt, have dipped into 
him. A good many writers are patently under 
his influence. But he is not read as Keats, 
Shelley, or Tennyson are read, and his influ- 
ence is not exercised over our best younger 
writers, and is, moreover, as often as not, indi- 
rect, operating through his French disciples 
upon persons who probably sneer at him. If 

[196] 



WALT WHITMAN 

this diagnosis be correct, it will be easy to find a 
reason ; and the reason is that he was most of the 
time a bad artist, and deliberately a bad artist. 

He said a good many things about his own 
writings. He also said, " Do I contradict my- 
self? Very well, then, I contradict myself." I 
do not think, however, that this could perti- 
nently be quoted against one who should see a 
quite fundamental contradiction between those 
passages in which he spoke for all the world as 
if he were the prophet neither of America nor 
of democracy, nor of anything else, and those 
other passages in which he bade a world in need 
of regeneration to listen to his " barbaric yawp." 
" No labour machine," he writes. 

Nor discovery have I made, 

Nor vpill I be able to leave behind me any wealthy bequest to 
found a hospital or library. 

Nor reminiscence of any deed of courage for America, 

Nor literary success nor intellect, nor book for the book- 
shelf. 

But a few carols vibrating through the air I leave, 

For comrades and lovers. 

One might think he was Burns or Herrick! 
Here as elsewhere he seems to forget what these 
" few carols " were like. Usually it was impos- 
sible to forget it. And he was never more 
truthful than when he said, '* The words of my 
book nothing, the drift of it everything." 

[197] 



LIFE AND LETTERS 

Unfortunately, comrades and lovers, poets 
and lovers of poetry, do not as a rule find last- 
ing nourishment in " carols " of which the doc- 
trine is everything and the words nothing. Art 
exists; and if Whitman's statement were liter- 
ally and always accurate, nobody would read 
him at all, for his sentences would not convey 
his meaning. It is still true that his " drift " is, 
in the mass of his work, the most, the only im- 
portant thing about him; and "drift" has a 
habit of getting out of date. When one says 
that he lost by throwing over the whole appa- 
ratus of what he regarded as feudal, monarchi- 
cal, European poetry, people sometimes sup- 
pose that one is complaining that he did not 
write in rhyme. That is absurd; nor as a rule 
did Milton. And Whitman's occasional rhymes — 
as in O Captain, My Captain, Ethiopia Saluting 
the Colours, and The Singer in the Prison — 
are not so elegant as to make anybody wish he 
had attempted more of them. It is not that. It 
is that, though he had a natural gift for beau- 
tiful rhythm, he customarily wrote a sort of 
spasmodic prose, and, above all that, attempted 
to do in poetry what, at any rate in his manner, 
could not be done. He had a gospel — ^vague, 
but vaguely fine — of democracy and of Ameri- 
canism. He tried in the light of this to survey 

[198] 



WALT WHITMAN 

all life and all effort, and in considerable detail. 
" I will report," he said, " all heroism from an 
American point of view." He tried, in a brief 
pemmicanising way, which usually excluded the 
wealth of detail which might have made such 
reports interesting, to report also all history, 
all industrial and commercial operations, all 
navigation and science, all physical experiences, 
and even all geography; and by adding up in- 
numerable small statements of them and wrap- 
ping them in a framework of democratic rhet- 
oric. There are poems of his which read like 
extracts from a gazetteer interspersed with the 
highest flights of Mr. Lloyd George's oratory. 
There are great formless masses and little form- 
less fragments, formless in general outline as 
they are in detail — mere exhortation and state- 
ments, having no artistic (I fall into his phrase- 
ology!) rapport. Possibly a diet of Leaves of 
Grass is neither sustaining nor digestible; but 
it is certainly not eatable. 

Few, I think, except critics in search of 
themes and desperate men in search of a creed, 
will in the future read and re-read the enormous 
mass of Walt's carols. But it will be, in a man- 
ner, kept afloat. Firstly, because of his per- 
sonality. It is quite true that " This is no book. 
Who touches this touches a man." There were 

[199] 



LIFE AND LETTERS 

affectations about him. A great deal of the 
time one feels that his sounding rhetoric is some- 
thing hollow: that he is " yawping " as loud as 
he can to keep up his convictions, if not his cour- 
age. And his cultivated mannerisms are, after 
the first attraction of their quaintness has 
passed, repulsive. " Camerado," " Libertad," 
" Omnes, omnes," and the rest of the jargon; 
how does it square with his assertion, for he 
meant to assert this, that he chose the first spon- 
taneous words he found? He may have shaken 
the dust of the Old World from his feet (which 
had never trodden it), but this did not stop him 
from calling a pavement, in an English poem, 
a " troittoir," nor did it prevent him from spell- 
ing " cosmos " with a " k," presumably because 
he had heard that the Greeks did so; he even 
went to the length of spelling Canada with a 
" K ," which the Greeks might have done had 
they had a chance, but which would scarcely be 
deemed a natural thing, even by a Spelling Re- 
former. " Me imperturbe, standing at ease in 
Nature " ; " Melange mine own, the unseen and 
the seen " ; a man who was only unself -con- 
sciously trying to convert people would not con- 
coct preposterous openings like those; and such 
sentences ("No dainty dolce affetuoso I," says 
he!) are sprinkled all over his works. Yet, at 
[200] 



WALT WHITMAN 

bottom, he was genuine and original; he said 
things that needed courage to say and things; 
which it gives courage to read. He will never 
again come with the freshness of appeal that he 
had forty or fifty years ago. Men then, shad- 
owed by " the Victorian compromise," hunger- 
ing for something audacious and brutal, were 
intensely thrilled by this voice, which came over 
the ocean crying, " I loaf and invite my soul," 
" I dote on myself, there is that lot of me and 
so luscious," proclaiming the most intimate of 
his physical sensations and unveiling the most 
shameful of his hypocrisies. We have got used 
to self-exposure and philosophic egoism since 
then; Whitman's uniqueness is less extensive 
and remarkable than it was. But he remains a 
man peculiar and great, and, in spite of all his 
efforts, a poet. The gold is scattered all over 
that great heap of quartz, and a few poems or 
sections of poems are gold all through. There 
are Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking, The 
Two Veterans, When Lilacs First in the Door- 
yard Bloomed, Beat, Beat Drums; a few more. 
Any stanza of the Dirge might be quoted: 

" Lo the moon ascending, up from the east 
the silvery round moon beautiful over the house- 
tops, ghastly, phantom moon, immense and 
silent moon. 

[201] 



LIFE AND LETTERS 

" I see a sad procession, and I hear the sound 
of coming full-key 'd bugles, all the channels of 
the city streets they're flooding, as with voices 
and with tears. 

" I hear the great drums pounding, and the 
small drums steady whirring, and every blow 
of the great convulsive drums strikes me through 
and through." 

But two things must be remarked. One is 
that when men quote Whitman or anthologise 
extracts from him, it is from the same few 
poems over and over again that they quote. And 
the other is that these are all poems in which 
Whitman fell (even when the verse is " free") 
into poetic rhythms and sometimes even into tra- 
ditional stanza forms. And they are poems 
in which he did what all must do who success- 
fully " carol " for comrades, lovers, or anybody 
else; poems in which he v/rote from the heart, 
localised the objects he was describing, and saw 
them clearly, communicated emotion instead of 
throwing a Dictionary and ten thousand Com- 
mandments at the intellect, and achieved the 
highest effects of art by the right use of 
" words," and the total neglect of what he nor- 
mally regarded as his " drift." 

[202] 



ROHMER 

A YEAR or two ago I drew, or attempted to 
draw, attention to the peculiar qualities of Mr. 
Sax Rohmer. Only in a casual and parentheti- 
cal way, however, for I was ostensibly writing 
about something else. A holiday, during which 
my brain has required and received rest, has 
brought me back to him. I unfortunately left 
at home half -read — if this personal interpolation 
may be pardoned — his latest work. I saw 
enough of it to be relieved of my fear, engen- 
dered by the last I had read (The Orchard of 
Tears), that ISIr. Rohmer was going to desert 
his natural province and attempt to emulate 
Miss Corelli, an operation for which he is not 
designed. But the advantage of liking a really 
popular author like Mr. Rohmer is that one 
can find his books, in cheap editions, on even 
the most Philistine of railway bookstalls, where 
Chesterton, Richard Jefferies, and even Dick- 
ens are names at which the clerk gapes in be- 
wilderment or boredom. I had therefore no dif- 
ficulty, at various stopping-places, in furnishing 
myself with the old familiar friends. The Mys- 

[203] 



LIFE AND LETTERS 

tery of Dr. Fu-Manchu, The Yellow Claw, 
Tales of Secret Egypt, The Devil Doctor, and 
The Si-Fan Mysteries. This last I am now 
reading. How, I wonder again, can any man 
with a taste for the nightmarish and phantas- 
magorial, and the desire of an occasional escape 
from the necessity of exerting his own intellect, 
deny that Mr. Rohmer is as competent a mer- 
chant of shocks as exists? 

The Si-Fan Mysteries is good all through. 
It even does what all good shockers do when 
their villains are too good to waste, disposes of 
its villain in such a manner that, although pre- 
sumably dead, he may well turn up again — 
like Sherlock Holmes. It begins in a London 
hotel, where a diplomat, worn to a shadow by a 
horrible secret, lies dying. It ends in a cave 
of the sea with pursuers hot on the heels of pur- 
sued, the lot frustrated, the last diabolical wea- 
pon foiled. Between this beginning and this end 
we have met the Man with the Limp and the 
deadly Flower of Silence. We have spent agi- 
tated hours in the Chinatown joy-shop, watched 
burglaries and poisonings, chased cabs, and 
heard strange knockings. We have learned the 
secret of the Golden Pomegranates and waited 
while Sir Baldwin Frazer operated, under com- 
pulsion, on Fu-Manchu's brain. We have 
[204] 



ROHMER 

rushed from the empty little house by the Bald- 
win, to the house at Wadsworth, the cafe in 
Soho, the Room with a Golden Door, and the 
dungeons of Greywater Park. No ingenuity, 
no method of transport, and no adjective has 
been spared. And if we notice, we notice with 
gratitude and a compliment, that almost the 
whole of the book's long action has been con- 
ducted at night, or, failing night, in thick fog. 
There are, to put it politely, distinct flaws in 
Mr. Rohmer's style. His sentences are often 
so spasmodic, his words so repetitive, that one 
sometimes suspects him of dictation. In several 
of his books, including The Si-Fan Mysteries, 
there is a character named Nayland-Smith. His 
status is odd: he appears to be a Burmese civil 
servant who gets, whenever Mr. Rohmer wants 
him, indefinite leave from some undefined au- 
thority in order to tackle problems that are a 
little abstruse for Scotland Yard. He is tall, 
lean, long of jaw; he has a habit, on almost 
every page, of either " loading " his pipe or 
letting fall the match with which he is about to 
light it. A careful artist would not repeat these 
things so often as Mr. Rohmer does; even the 
most patient reader is apt sometimes to wish 
that, for once, Nayland-Smith would break the 
monotony by employing, on the one hand, a 

[205] 



LIFE AND LETTERS 

cigar or a cigarette, or, on the other, a patent 
lighter. Nay land- Smith's mode of expressing 
himself is as little varied as his *' business with 
hands and pipe." I extract a few specimens 
from pp. 122-123 of The Si-Fan Mysteries: 

" Take my hand," he snapped energetically. 
" Sit tight and catch," rapped Smith. 
"Come on, Weymouth!" rapped Nayland- 
Smith. 

" You don't have to," snapped Smith. 

Very seldom indeed does Nayland-Smith say, 
cry, continue, resume, observe, rejoin, remark, 
reply, or interject. I find him occasionally mut- 
tering or jerking, but the immense majority of 
his sentences are either rapped or snapped. 
This, quite apart from the fact that it might 
well have put his companions off their game, 
becomes so irritating that the reader would wel- 
come anything, anything, for a change — even 
the "he husked" and "he hoarsed " of Mr. 
Leacock's celebrated burlesque. 

Here are some of Mr. Rohmer's defects; I 
suppose I had better add, though I personally 
am corrupt enough to delight in them, the truly 
terrible words that he invents. In one of his 
books, all the well-known shuddery words hav- 
ing been worn to rags, he finds it necessary, in 
[206] 



ROHMER 

order to get one more thrill out of the exhausted 
nerves, to begin describing things as " bee- 
tlesque." His shadows are " cloisteresque," his 
music is " luresome," and the trackers on the 
roof of the Cafe de I'Egypte look down on " the 
teemful streets of Soho." But what of that? 
Words are Mr. Kohmer's slaves, not his mas- 
ters. He uses them as a great painter uses his 
colours; he is bound by no conventions, but 
thinks only of the effects at which he is aiming. 
And he achieves them. There are many writers 
of cheap shockers as reckless of English, as un- 
trammelled by considerations of " verisimili- 
tude," as resolved to get six thrills to the page, 
as debonair in the constant use of old materials 
which themselves or others have found satisfac- 
tory, as Mr. Rohmer. We know elsewhere — 
oh! how plentifully elsewhere — ^these mysterious 
Chinese, these Oriental brass boxes, these opium 
dens — shells, I should say — these wharves by the 
foggy Thames, these police boats and floating 
corpses, these palatial hotels (I should say khans 
or caravanserais) with their suave managers, 
these underground tunnels, these furtive serv- 
ants, these rope-ladders and blow-pipes, these 
rooms in the Temple, these boomings of Big 
Ben at midnight. We know, how well, 
that distraught girl in the rain with the black 

[207] 



LIFE AND LETTERS 

scarf over her head and that other hussy, 
dark-eyed, with the voluptuous lips and the 
snake bangle, who is " probably a Eurasian." 
But when we meet them in Mr. Rohmer they 
have an extra touch of vividness that they lack 
elsewhere. It is he, and not his rivals, who has 
left permanently impressed on my imagination 
the picture of a man shamming sleep in an 
opium den whilst the local siren, with death in 
her hands, lifts his eyelids to test him; the pic- 
ture of a bony yellow arm thrust into the moon- 
light in a high room. And, to do him justice, 
he has not left the shocker-maker's cabinet of 
properties where he found it. The Chinese sci- 
entific genius who kidnaps illustrious English 
doctors, hypnotises them and makes them work 
for the dominance of the Yellow Race is, I think, 
a novel conception. The wholesale importation 
of Oriental spiders, scorpions, and snakes into 
an English baronet's premises has not, I believe, 
been done before. And some of Dr. Fu-Man- 
chu's scientific inventions are indisputably new, 
notably that memorable cross between a fungus 
and a microbe, used in that case where the fun- 
gus fell like dust on the explorers and instan- 
taneously began to spread cankerously over all 
their flesh. I could give others, only one should 
not queer the pitch. But I have said enough, I 
[208] 



ROHMER 

hope, to indicate that Mr. Rohmer — though his 
morals are uniformly as sound as those of all 
melodramatists — has as vivid and unwholesome 
an imagination, as fecund a spring of morbid 
invention, as any writer in the cheap series or 
out of them. Of course, if one examines his 
plots and his machinery with the cold eye of a 
scientific investigator one will very probably 
arrive at the conclusion that all would not have 
happened just as he says it does, that his char- 
acters would not in all cases have behaved as 
he makes them, and, particularly, that the idio- 
cies committed in these, as in all mystery books, 
by the paladins fighting on the side of the 
angels, in order to give the villains a good run, 
might in most cases have been avoided. But 
readers who examine the art of the fabulist in 
this manner should avoid Mr. Rohmer. He is 
not for the pedant. He is for those who can 
fall under his spell sufficiently to believe what- 
ever he says. Of that company I am one. 

The book is open before me. The last sen- 
tences on the page catch my eye. The trapdoor 
is softly closed. The men stand over the panes 
of the skylight: 

" Look," he said, " there is the house of 
hashish " — 

I shall stop writing this, and go on from there. 

[209] 



POPE 

In a Leslie Stephen lecture published by the 
Cambridge University Press, Mr. J. W. Mac- 
kail attempts and gives a fresh survey of the 
problem of Pope. It was time someone did. 
The reaction still lasts, and there is still current 
the view of Pope as a poet of the reign of Queen 
Anne whose demise was almost as final as his 
sovereign's, a spiteful little man of some wit, 
who wrote interminable, maddeningly monoto- 
nous couplets, which, when they were not about 
Grub Street, were concerned with nymphs, 
swains, groves, the finny tribe, and the con- 
scious main. A widespread view; not, of course, 
the view of any man at aU familiar with Pope. 
But even those who have read him do not com- 
monly do justice to his native powers or recog- 
nise the elements in him of a quite other kind 
of poet — a poet of large imagination, alive to 
natural beauty and the mystery of life. 

Mr. Mackail's lecture would be serviceable 
did it do no more than call attention to Pope's 
earlier works, and to the fact that it was by 
[210] 



f POPE 

those that his best contemporaries thought that 
he would live. Those later works with which 
Pope's name is now chiefly associated contain 
stray passages noble in conception, in diction, 
in march ; the end of the Dunciad testifies to the 
eye that saw and the hand that executed, years 
earlier, that vision of the happy solitary who 

Bids his free soul expatiate in the skies. 
Amid her kindred stars familiar roam. 
Survey the region, and confess her home. 

Frequently in the Homer, and sometimes later, 
we have instances of his accurate observation 
and most felicitous translation of natural ob- 
jects; the couplet 

Lo where Maeotis sleeps, and hardly flows 
The freezing Tanais through a waste of snows 

was Pope's own favourite, which shows that his 
judgment remained sound to the last. But in 
those early works, which are now so often ig- 
nored, but on which, we should not forget, his 
contemporary fame was chiefly based, beauty is 
frequent, and " the singing voice." 

Mr. Mackail quotes " Wher'er you walk," a 
quatrain unsurpassable for delicate grace. But 
!he might have taken his quotations from almost 
anywhere in Windsor Forest, the Pastorals, or 

[211] 



LIFE AND LETTERS 

The Rape of the Lock. His quatrain can al- 
most be equalled from the third Pastoral: 

Oft on the rind I carved her amorous vows. 
While she with garlands hung the bending boughs : 
The garlands fade, the vows are worn away, 
So dies her love, and so my hopes decay, 

and both Windsor Forest and the Pastorals are 
full of examples of his feeling for a certain kind 
of landscape and his art in conveying it. All 
the Forest passages about hunting, fishing, trees 
and birds might be quoted. This is character- 
istic in subject, though the double " while " is 
weak and those oxen are lifted from Comus: 

Here where the mountains, lessening as they rise. 
Lose the low vales, and steal into the skies: 
While labouring oxen, spent with toil and heat. 
In their loose traces from the field retreat. 
While circling smokes from village-tops are seen 
And the fleet shades glide o'er the dusky green. 

Mr. Mackail suggests that he has been disliked \ 
for using the diction of his own age, and not 
that of another age. There is something in this, 
but it is also true, not only that he did the best 
things best, but that when he is at his finest his 
diction is least peculiarly of his own time. 

Pope began with a great, not the greatest, 

equipment. In spite of his occasional grandeurs 

it is likely that, had he matured as he began, he 

would have become at all events one of the 

[212] 



POPE 

greatest of pastoral poets, a poet covering in 
his landscape the range from Claude to Wat- 
teau, seldom far from Dresden in his figures, 
and making music akin to that of the French 
and Venetian composers of his century. But he 
did not mature. It was not, as has been sup- 
posed, that he either was or became entirely a 
man with tastes and no feelings, artificial and 
urban. He did not lose the sense which made 
him write of a character : 

Tired of the scene parterres and fountains yield. 
He finds at last he better likes a field. 

But his interests did shift, and his sensibilities 
did become atrophied; he turned his back on 
beauty; his music became rarer. Concurrently 
his versification hardened. The drying up of 
the singing impulse left his verse rigid; all his 
art and critical sense could not supply that flow 
and sway into which emotion would have car- 
ried his verse automatically. His passion had 
never been strong; the couplet, with him, would 
always have been a dangerous instrument; but 
when his subjects ceased to move him there was 
nothing to prevent his fondness for neatness 
getting the better of him. A man can never be 
too careful about accuracy of phrasing; and all 
good poets correct. But correction became a 

[213] 



LIFE AND LETTERS 

mania with Pope, and it was correction mis- 
placed. He trimmed until almost every couplet 
looked like almost every other couplet. He 
spoke of 

that unwearied mill 
That burn'd ten thousand verses 

with more truth than he knew. It was then 
that he was making poetry that " mere mechanic 
art " against which Cowper and Keats revolted. 
The couplet got hold of him, the Muse let him 
go, and he developed vices which a thousand 
slavish imitators copied. 

The Muse let him go. Mr. Mackail gives 
several reasons why Pope did not become a very 
great poet. He refers to the unlyrical quality 
of his age, the cramping effect of " his method 
of distillation and concentration," and his " low 
vitality "; but he gets nearest to the fundamen- 
tal thing when he speaks of his " artificially lim- 
ited scope of interest," matter reacting on style. 
Temperament was at the bottom of his failure 
to fulfil his promise. He brought himself into 
a state of mind unfavourable to the highest kind 
of production. There is a phrase in one of the 
epistles : 

at night 
Fools rush into my head and so I write. 
[214] 



POPE 

The consummate cleverness of his satire could 
never be disputed. It may be argued that he 
sometimes polished and heightened his invective 
too much. But as a rule he seizes weaknesses 
with an infallible malice, and crystallises them 
into perfect phraseology. Everybody knows the 
marvellous passage about Addison, the " damn 
with faint praise " passage ; probably no poet 
in any language has strung together so compact, 
so pregnant, so witty a series of epigrams. All 
his satirical works are thick strewn with exam- 
ples of that power of saying an acid thing with 
the utmost possible compression. They are 
plentiful in the Epistle to Arhuthnot, an exam- 
ple being his tribute to small critics who write 
about great authors : 

Even such small critics some regard may claim. 
Preserved in Milton's or in Shakespeare's name. 
Pretty ! in amber to observe the forms 
Of hairs, or straws, or dirt, or grubs, or worms ! 
The things, we know, are neither rich nor rare. 
But wonder how the devil they got there. 

What ease there is in such couplets from the 
Dunciad as: 

While pensive poets painful vigils keep. 
Sleepless themselves, to give their readers sleep, 

and the demolishing lines on Settle, the City 
poet, who celebrates a civic pageant: 



LIFE AND LETTERS 

Now night descending, the proud scene was o'er, 
But lived, in Settle's numbers, one day more. 

But marvellous though his satire was, it was 
the symptom of a disease. " Fools rush into 
my head." That became his condition. He 
turned away from the great themes, he lost the 
habit, if never entirely the capacity, of contem- 
plating and responding to the sublime and the 
lovely in nature and the heart of man. Lacking 
that " fierce indignation " which Swift professed 
and often felt, he spent his days and nights 
thinking splenetically of people who had of- 
fended him and people whose only offence was 
that they had no brains. He came to wear a 
permanent sneer; he developed a preference for 
saying a biting rather than a beautiful thing; 
he chose to be satirical, and he became, though 
to the last he was liable to make an exquisite 
phrase or to glide briefly into sublimity, a satir- 
ist pure and simple. If a man constantly prac- 
tises satire, that is bound to be his fate; he may 
have many moods, but if the satirical mood be- 
comes a habit of mind he is, as a poet, done for, 
for poetry is the fruit of love, sympathy, humil- 
ity, and awe, which are no qualities for a witty 
scourger of fools. 



[216] 



GOD SAVE THE KING 

The controversy about the National Anthem 
has broken out once more. Everybody admits 
that the words of the existing anthem — its Ger- 
man tune has a certain massive dignity when 
sung by a large crowd — are weak. Even in the 
first verse: 

Send him victorious, 
Happy and glorious 
Long to reign over us 

would appear extremely crude to us were it not 
hallowed by long usage. Mrs. Browning her- 
self never perpetrated a worse rhyme. And as 
for the rest, where it is not clumsy it is, to mod- 
ern sensibilities, offensive. People point out 
that when we are at peace with the world it is 
wantonly brutal for us to sing — in the most 
solemn and feeling way, too — those lines which 
are the most direct and vigorous of the lot : 

Confound their politics. 
Frustrate their knavish tricks, 

whilst, session by session, the King announces 
from the throne " my relations with foreign 

[217] 



LIFE AND LETTERS 

Powers continue to be friendly." The thing 
should be rewritten, we are told ; we should have 
a more competently written poem as our An- 
them, and one that should embody, not the pas- 
sions of 1719, but the loftiest aspirations of 1919. 
From time to time, therefore, new versions ap- 
pear. The latest was sung the other day " under 
official auspices." The author of the new verses 
kept his "name dark, and when he heard what 
people said about them he must have congratu- 
lated himself upon his reticence. 

Certainly his effort was very feeble. But I 
do not think those newspaper critics who de- 
mand that the Poet Laureate, or Mr. Kipling, 
or Mr. Smith should produce us a fine new 
anthem quite understand the difficulty of the 
task. We may waive the general difficulty of 
doing things to order, and admit that a great 
many people have written, deliberately and in 
response to a demand, ceremonial verses per- 
fectly adapted to their purpose. But any Na- 
tional Anthem must be a pecuhar thing, and our 
own presents special difficulties, which we will 
come to later. 

The first thing to be observed is that your 
words must be singable, and the second is that 
they must be capable of being understood by, 
and sympathetically sung by, the whole popu- 

[218] 



GOD SAVE THE KING 

lation. The author is not to express his purely 
personal sentiments, nor the feelings or concep- 
tions of any particular class, defined by locality, 
political views, or education. He may (to take 
extreme illustrations) wish that God should con- 
vert the King to Judaism, or that the King 
should make war upon the Japanese; but these 
are not amongst the common and abiding de- 
sires of the generality of Englishmen. He may, 
when he looks for what is central in the Eng- 
land that he loves, think of Chaucer and Shake- 
speare, of Milton's Areopagitica, of Magdalen 
Tower, the oaks of Sussex, or village churches 
at evening with rooks flying about their elms. 
But he cannot mention them; the personal, or 
sectional, quality in imagination or taste must be 
avoided; and, by the same token, all words not 
in common use, all images that to a labourer 
would seem recondite, and even all metrical de- 
vices that would puzzle the simple. He is to 
find the Greatest Common Measure of the 
poetical; and, by the time he has found it along 
his line of search there will probably be very 
little poetry left. The sentiments of a National 
Anthem must be sentiments understood and 
shared by at least a majority of the English- 
speaking inhabitants of the empire; they must 
be above dispute, except by cranks, they must 

[219] 



LIFE AND LETTERS 

be as comprehensive as possible, and they must 
focus as great a portion as possible of the emo- 
tions and thoughts that all patriotic men have 
about the empire, its merits, and its functions 
in the world. 

So there is no chance for the specific or the 
picturesque. Many men have failed with the 
National Anthem by trying to give it a beauty 
of detail which it literally is not capable of bear- 
ing. Possibly the most skilfully written of all 
new versions was that of the late James Elroy 
Flecker. His second verse ran: 

Thou in his suppliant hands 
Hast placed such Mighty Lands : 

Save thou our King! 
As once from golden Skies 
Rebels with flaming eyes. 
So the King's Enemies 

Doom thou and fling. 

And in the later verses he cast his thought on 
the 

Few dear miles 
Of sweetly-meadowed Isles, 

celebrating the loveliness of each kingdom. That 
his version is, as a poem to be read or spoken, 
immeasurably superior to the old version a child 
could see. Yet the better it is the worse it is. 

[220] 



GOD SAVE THE KING 



Those subtle effects, those chosen epithets, those 
efforts of the imagination, are, in a popular an- 
them for singing, all wrong. They would hold 
the singer up; his attention would be detained 
by single words; and, beyond all this, he would 

; certainly be too sheepish and self-conscious to 
sing such words. A large congregation could 
only sing this version when men had got so accli- 
matised to it that they never thought of its 
meaning. In the ideal anthem, to be sung nat- 

j urally by all men, the poet must put common- 
places in a manner which will be simple and 
clear without being too banal. 

Here is a task difficult enough, whatever the 
metre and whatever the time. But he who 
would compose new verses to God Save the King 
has a heavier handicap still. His words must 
not merely be singable, but they must be sing- 
able to that loud tune, with its series of hard 
thumps with a trip at the end of each. And they 
must be written in a very constricting metre. 
The end of the line is problem enough. It al- 
most compels the use of misplaced stresses. But 
the beginning is a fetter. Each line must start 
with an emphatic word. It would be prepos- 
terous to come down with such a whack upon 
" And," or indeed any conjunctive or unimpor- 
tant syllable; and the result of this is that each 

[221] 



LIFE AND LETTERS 

line must almost necessarily be a complete phrase 
without run over. 

The difficulties and the perils being such, 
failure being so easy and success so unlikely, the 
wonder is that anybody but an innocent or 
a vainglorious simpleton should be courageous 
enough to try his hand at the reformation of our 
Anthem. But such is the attraction of the diffi- 
cult, such the force of patriotism, and so pow- 
erful the dislike of the existing Anthem, that 
even the most sensitive and fastidious artists i 
are tempted by the problem. I recently spent 
some days with two who had settled down to it 
with the determination not to stop until they 
had produced something satisfactory. Either 
of them could write finely of patriotism; both, 
in fact, have done so ; but not all their love of | 
England and enlightened ideals seemed to be I 
availing them here, and their delicate ears 
seemed to be rather an impediment than other- 
wise with that ruthless tune dragging their sylla- 
bles after it. If they produce good and inter- 
esting poems, as they will end by doing, their 
next step will be to knock out all the original 
lines and substitute trite ones, to replace most 
of their concrete words by abstract ones (thus 
reversing the usual rule), and to substitute for 
all epithets which have flavour adjectives look- 
[222] I 



GOD SAVE THE KING 

ing quite ordinary. When, finally, they have 
achieved anthems which are acceptable as to sen- 
timents, mention all the agreed and large things, 
amit all else, and can be spoken with as little 
attention to the particular words as one gives 
when one says " Pass the butter," they will 
probably find it difficult to distinguish the re- 
sults of their labours from the dull effusions of 
the many poetasters who have essayed the same 
task. They will look a little atrabiliously at 
those strings of vapid observations about the 
wide Empire (or "Empire wide" — to scan). 
Truth, Justice, Liberty, Freedom, Union, Love, 
and Peace, punctuated by those periodic God 
Saves, they will ask themselves whether it was 
for this that Heaven gave them brains and the 
gift of Poetry, and they will ultimately — though 
people do stumble on miracles — think it best to 
destroy, or at least to conceal, the proofs of 
their failure to perform the impossible and their 
lamentable success in producing the bad. 



[223] 



MIDSHIPMAN EASY 

It was hot weather. I had intended to read a 
book about education. But the sun withered 
up my incHnation, and casting about for some- 1' 
thing which I should certainly be able to enjoy, 
and which would not demand from me an intel- 
lectual effort to which I felt unequal, I bor- 
rowed a copy of Midshipman Easy, which I had 
read many times, but not for years past. I 
found it better than ever, and could not help 
wondering how it is that Marryat is so often 
treated as no more than a slightly superior 
Henty, who concocted " adventure stories " for 
boys and was an effective recruiting agent for 
the Royal Navy. 

If there is in the English language a book of 
the adventurous kind more full of exciting fights 
and escapes, freer from dull pages, more diversi- 
fied, more amusing, and, I may add, better writ- 
ten, I do not know it. It may certainly be 
argued that the adventures are very crowded, 
that luck unduly favours the hero, and that the 
good characters are exceptionally good; but it 
[224! 



MIDSHIPMAN EASY 

is as realistic as a book of the sort could be, and 
if nothing is to happen in novels that could not 
happen in normal life, we should have a tedious 
time of it. The characters are slight, and some 
of them are caricatures ; but that is bound to be 
so if incident is what a writer is mainly con- 
cerned with, and Marryat seems to me to give 
as good pictures of his people as is conformable 
with the nature, pace, and rapid change of his 
story. As an inventor of good incident not even 
the Stevenson of Treasure Island, not even, I 
think, Dumas, could beat him at his best. And 
in Midshipman Easy he was at his best all the 
time. 

Think of the succession of episodes we have 
been through before we have come to the end; 
Jack's early escapades, his encounter with Mr. 
Bonnycastle, his first burst at the Blue Posts, his 
battles with Vigors, his three-cornered duel with 
the bo'sun and the swell mobsman, some of the 
finest little sea-fights in literature; the "Duty 
before Decency " incident, the cruise with the 
mutineers who were cowed by ground-sharks, 
the rescue of the three ladies and the hoisting of 
the green petticoat (the emblem of equality), 
the fight with the padrone and his men in the 
speronare, the heroic siege in Sicily when the 
galley slaves battered their way from floor to 

[225] 



LIFE AND LETTERS 

floor — there are all these and a hundred minor 
excitements which were all a part of the day's 
work; and thrown in are the history of Mesty — 
Mephistopheles Faust, the Ashantee chief — and 
the blood-curdling story of Don Rebeira. Hun- 
dreds of characters of several nations have 
crossed the scene, and glimpses have been given 
of half the Mediterranean, and the whole per- 
formance has been accomplished unerringly. No 
discursion or discussion is ever kept up a minute 
too long to keep the reader's attention, and the 
actual writing is so good that it is difficult to 
understand that it does not receive more notice. 
I will quote the very first paragraph of the 
book: 

" Mr. Nicodemus Easy was a gentleman who 
lived down in Hampshire; he was a married 
man and in very easy circumstances. Most 
couples find it very easy to have a family, but 
not always quite so easy to maintain them. Mr. 
Easy was not at all uneasy on the latter score, 
as he had no children; but he was anxious to 
have them, as most people covet what they can- 
not obtain. After ten years, Mr. Easy gave it 
up as a bad job. Philosophy is said to console a 
man under disappointment, although Shake- 
speare asserts that it is no remedy for tooth- 
[226] 



MIDSHIPMAN EASY 

ache; so Mr. Easy turned philosopher, the very- 
best profession a man can take up, when he is 
fit for nothing else ; he must be a very incapable 
person indeed who cannot talk nonsense. For 
some time Mr. Easy could not decide upon what 
description his nonsense should consist of; at 
last he fixed upon the rights of man, equality, 
and all that; how every person was born to in- 
herit his share of the earth, a right at present 
only admitted to a certain length ; that is, about 
six feet, for we all inherit our graves, and are 
allowed to take possession without dispute. But 
no one would listen to Mr. Easy's philosophy. 
The women would not acknowledge the rights of 
men, whom they declared always to be in the 
wrong; and, as the gentlemen who visited Mr. 
Easy were all men of property, they could not 
perceive the advantage of sharing with those 
who had none. However, they allowed him to 
discuss the question, while they discussed his 
port. The wine was good, if the arguments 
were not, and we must take things as we find 
them in this world." 

Could there be a brisker opening, a livelier, 
cleaner narrative style? The whole chapter is 
a model; the concluding paragraph as terse, 
businesslike, and sufficient as could be: 

[227] 



LIFE AND LETTERS 

" In due course of time, Mrs. Easy presented 
her husband with a fine boy, whom we present 
to the public as our hero." 

The epigrammatic economy of the style is pre- 
served throughout the book. There is no strain- 
ing after phrases. Marryat scatters freely little 
mots like, " A man who is able and willing to 
pay a large tavern bill will always find follow- 
ers — that is to the tavern " ; but these always 
arise directly out of the narrative — are never 
(as it were) stuck on. There is none of that 
terrible sermonising which adds immeasurably 
to the tedium of Henty and W. H. G. Kings- 
ton, and is, no doubt, supposed to be " good for 
boys." Marryat closes his discussions like this: 
" Here an argument ensued upon love, which we 
we shall not trouble the reader with, as it was 
not very profound, both sides knowing very 
little on the subject." But we can stand more 
talk from Marryat's heroes than from those of 
any writer of mere " books for boys." For in- 
stance, Jack's philosophisings about the rights 
of man, the ratiocinations by which he consoles 
himself in the most uncomfortable predicaments 
are done with delicious lightness. A typical ex- 
ample comes early, when, after practising his 
father's equality notions at the expense of the 
[228] 



MIDSHIPMAN EASY 

farmer's apples, he tumbles down the well, and, 
at the bottom, soliloquises: 

" ' At all events,' thought Jack, ' if it had 
not been for the bull, I should have been 
watched by the dog, and then thrashed by the 
farmer; but then again, if it had not been for 
the bull, I should not have tumbled among the 
bees, and if it had not been for the bees, I should 
not have tumbled into the well ; and if it had not 
been for the chain, I should have been drowned. 
Such has been the chain of events, all because 
I wanted to eat an apple. 

" * However, I have got rid of the farmer, 
and the dog, and the bull, and the bees — all's 
well that ends well; but how the devil am I to 
get out of the well? All creation appear to have 
conspired against the rights of man. As my 
father said, this is an iron age, and here I am 
swinging to an iron chain.' " 

Where has that method been seen since? There 
is something of it in Peacock. But where had 
it been seen before? The answer is obvious to 
anyone who is familiar with the novels of Vol- 
taire. I am not sufficiently acquainted with the 
biography of Marryat to know if there is evi- 
dence that he had read Voltaire. But his mode 

[229] 



LIFE AND LETTERS 

of narration is most obviously derived from Vol- 
taire, and the relations between Eiasy pere and 
Jack were, I should say, almost unquestionably 
suggested by those between Dr. Pangloss and 
Candide. It is a far cry from the subversive 
sceptic of Ferney to the English post captain; 
but stranger connections have been estab- 
lished. 

Marryat is unduly neglected. Midshipman 
Easy is beyond doubt his masterpiece ; but Peter 
Simple runs it very hard. These and Poor Jack 
and the Pirate and the Three Cutters certainly 
seem to me as works of art, as stories, and as 
pictures of life, fully equal to the novels of 
Smollett, even when one remembers Humphry 
Clinker. Yet Peregrine Pickle and Roderick 
Random, little though they may be read, are 
treated as classics in all text-books, whilst Mar- 
ryat usually has to be contented with a para- 
graph or a mere " mention " in a list. Is it be- 
cause his books interest boys and are therefore 
supposed to be fit for no one else? Perhaps he 
would be taken a little more seriously in this 
age of propaganda if the fact were recalled that 
he consciously (though not excessively) worked 
with a purpose. He desired not only to write 
amusing and exciting books, but to expose the 
brutalities and injustices of the Old Navy; and, 
[230] 



MIDSHIPMAN EASY 

just as the effects of Mr. Galsworthy's Justice 
were, by ministerial admission, immediately evi- 
dent in prison legislation, so Marryat's The, 
King's Own led to changes in naval administra- 
tion, as the Admiralty frankly acknowledged. 



[231] 



JANE CAVE 

I WAS rummaging on a bookstall. I opened 
a book in faded boards and was struck by a 
remarkable frontispiece plate. It represented 
an eighteenth-century lady seated before a large 
volume and holding a quill pen in an impossibly 
placed hand. Her hair was elaborately dressed ; 
on her shoulders she wore a lace wrap, on her 
head something like a beribboned lamp-shade, 
and on her face a seraphically complacent smile. 
The title-page was inscribed: "Poems on Vari- 
ous Subjects, Entertaining, Elegiac, and Re- 
ligious. By Jane Cave. Winchester: Printed 
for the Author by J. Sadler, 1783." This was 
enough. I bought the book and found it 
remarkable. 

Internal evidence suggests that this Miss Cave 
was a Methodist of Welsh extraction, that she 
held some superior household post, and that she 
was freely admitted to the society of her em- 
ployers and their friends, though she " never 
forgot the deference due " to those " in a sta- 
tion above her." " Soft affluence," she ex- 
[232] 



JANE CAVE 

plains (in a poem to an unkind lady who 
doubted if she composed the poems to which 
her name was attached), had not been her lot. 
But the Muse, 

tho' she is a guest majesUc 
May deign to dwell in a domestic. 

Nevertheless, she explains elsewhere, she works 
under difficulties. No sooner has she felt in- 
spiration than Duty intervenes: 

Now Duty's call I never must refuse, 

I rise — and with a blush myself excuse. 

She lived, like Jane Austen, in a small world; 
but, in spite of all impediments, she got enough 
out of that world to show her quality. 

Her amorous and narrative poems are slightly 
disappointing. She employs the sham Latin 
names then in vogue; a betraj^ed maiden is 
" Credulia " and her betrayer " Perfidio." These 
poems are mostly banal; it is when she is writ- 
ing of actual events and experiences that she 
becomes truly herself. A young soldier marries 
a young woman. 

Who proof remains 'gainst cannon balls and fire. 
May by one glance from Sylvia's eyes expire. 

Here she addresses the man; in another epi- 
thalamium she hails the lady who (this is the 
final crashing couplet) will never regret: 

[233] 



LIFE AND LETTERS 

That you declin'd the pleasing name of B — m 
And that alone preferr'd of H — rag — m: 

The blanks appear in the original; she little 
knew when she wrote that 130 years afterwards 
a man would spend half a morning trying, and 
failing, to complete the surnames which made, 
by so remarkable a coincidence, that useful 
rhyme. She was very adaptable. She wrote 
for one person a rebuke to a surly housemaid; 
for another a poem on Castles. It is a fine 
performance, but put in the shade by her long 
metrical account of an excursion to a Ducal 
Seat at Itchen. " The morn did a bad day 
portend," but it cleared up. They had lunch, 
and then started for the mansion, where they 
experienced all the proper emotions: 

A while we after dinner sat. 

Engaged in inoffensive chat, 

Then arm in arm, in pairs we stalk. 

And to his Grace's mansion walk. 

Here, each apartment we behold. 

Doth something of the Duke unfold. 

Magnificence decks ev'ry place. 

And speaks the owner is his Grace. 

Some ancient portraits caught my eye. 

Which bid my bosom heave a sigh. 

For ah ! those once lov'd forms with reptiles lie. 

What a synonym! 

Miss Cave was versatile. She wrote a poem 
on seeing Lady P. at church, where she was 
[234] 



JANE CAVE 

agreeably surprised to find that (in spite of 
her rank) Lady P. did not laugh or chatter; 
she wrote another, " On Hearing Prophane 
Cursing and Swearing." But death was her 
favourite subject. The elegiac note is all- 
pervading, especially in a lament for a gardener 
who had left his favourite sphere for a better 
world, Miss Cave having the thankless task of 
catechising his plants as to his whereabouts: 

Hot-house or greenhouse, next I aske of you 
But ye unwilling are to tell me too. 
Of ev'ry plant, and tree, and flower I ask. 
But none will undertake the painful task. 

This is odd enough, but I doubt if there exists 
in the language so strange a series of elegies 
and epitaphs as Miss Cave groups together at 
the end of her volume. Some of them have 
lay subjects. There was a bereaved mother 
to whom each sympathetic herb and plant ad- 
dressed consolation: 

Prepare, she cries — prepare to meet the blest, 
And join your Sally in eternal rest. 

But clergymen were her peculiar forte. White- 
field was the most notable of her subjects; 
the rest were obscure clerics who, unfortunately, 
all had names that were incongruous with high- 
flown surroundings. There was one, the Rev. 
Howel Harris: 

[235] 



K 



LIFE AND LETTERS 

Advanc'd beyond their frowns, beyond their praise, 
Harris with Angels tunes his grateful lays. 
He sits with all those radiant hosts above. 
And swims in seas of pure celestial love. 

He certainly deserved his promotion; his feat? 
on earth are celebrated with unconscious blas- 
phemy when Miss Cave hopes: j 

That God from aye, to aye, may carry on i 

Th' amazing work which Harris hath begun. I 

A fellow-subject, or victim, was the Reverend 
Mr. Watkins. On earth he left a gap. All 

With whom he did in Christian union meet 
The death of Watkins greatly must regret. 

On the other hand: 

Hark! how the Heavenly choir began to sing 
A song of praise, when Watkins entered in. 

I wonder what was the motive of the man who 
suggested that so solemn a poetess and precise 
a morahst should tackle (as she once did) the 
subject of Love and Wine, Venus and Bacchus? 
I don't think that " P. G., Esq., of Winchester," 
to whom is attributed the suggestion, can have 
been entirely serious. I see Miss Cave as a 
person, vain as Mr. Collins and voluble as Miss 
Bates, apt to go into a huff, very conscious of 
her own acquirements, in spite of her large as- 

[236] 



JANE CAVE 

sumption of modesty. " P. G., Esq." was tired 
of her presence and her tongue, I think; and 
when she coyly asked him what he would like 
her to write about, he named that most unsuit- 
able of themes, and she — unaware of the twitch- 
ing on his lips — at once attempted it. 

Whoever and whatever she was she was cer- 
tainly a nailer. Her book is badly produced, 
the pages go in and out, so that one is always 
turning over several at a time. It is obvious 
that she feared this when she was reading 
her proofs. It made her angry, and on the 
'' Errata " page appears the following " Adver- 
tisement ": 

" Whereas the Printer of this work did en- 
gage with the Author that it should be printed 
and completely finished in an elegant, masterly 
manner, on a new type and good paper, all 
the same sort, size, and colour. Therefore, if 
jpon inspection it is found not answerable to 
che above engagement, the Printer has violated 
lis agreement, deceived and disappointed the 
Author, and is wholly accountable for the 
iefect." 

[t must have been a very strong-minded woman 
.vho was able to compel her publisher to eat 

[237] 



LIFE AND LETTERS 

dirt in public like this. But she must have had! 
her consolations. Her list of subscribers in- 
cludes about two thousand names, and even at 
that several hundred names arrived too late for 
insertion. She groups them by towns: there are 
hundreds from Oxford, Salisbury, and Win- 
chester, and little contingents from Cowes, Gos- 
port, Fareham, Newbury, and other places. 
The " travelling " of the book must have been 
scientifically managed ; never in history, I should 
think, have so many copies of so utterly feeble 
a book been sold in advance. And now nobody 
knows it! 



[238] 



GALLERIES 

Mr. Joseph Duveen has presented the na- 
;ion with a sum of money to build a Gallery 
)f Modern Foreign Art. It is certainly needed. 
The neglect of modern foreign art — especially 
French and Dutch art — has not been complete 
n this country; British collectors were early 
:o appreciate the Barbizon school, and in the 
last fifteen years there has certainly been enough 
ivriting and exhibiting to famiharise the public 
ivith the nature of almost everything that has 
been done in Europe in our time. But, owing 
to lack of money, or conservatism, or timidity, 
3r all of these, it is just to say that for our 
National Gallery modern painting does not 
exist. One or two donors have presented us 
with a few pictures by Corot, Daubigny, Diaz, 
and the Marises; Courbet may be found at 
South Kensington and a few provincial gal- 
leries have gone a little farther. But it is 
nobody's business to watch what is being done 
and to see — to put it crudely — that we get in 
early and cheap. As things stand there are 

[239] 



LIFE AND LETTERS 

masters, recognised as such by competent per 
sons in every country, who are quite unrepre-ii 
sented in the national collections, and of whom, 
if things went on as they are, we should, fifty 
years hence, be buying inferior examples at 
prodigious prices. We need not have been 
quite so badly off as we are. If Dr. Bode was 
able — as he was — to acquire pictures by Cezanne 
and hang them at Berlin (Cezanne and his con 
temporaries are also to be seen at ISIunich), and 
if the Rejks Museum at Amsterdam found van 
Gogh worthy of a room to himself, it is clear 
that the care of a collection of old masters, and 
the liking for them, does not necessarily pre 
elude a judgment upon and taste for what hasi 
been done quite recently. But our National] 
Gallery has laboured under obvious difficulties, 
and a new gallery and separate control is the 
obvious solution. There will be little difficulty 
in starting such a collection. France, Belgium, 
and Holland will provide the obvious basis, 
Corot and his contemporaries, the Marises, 
Mauve, probably Israels and Bosboom. The 
more venerable critics will be shocked when (as 
they wiU have to) Gaugin and Cezanne get 
in ; but they will scarcely lift their voices against 
Renoir and Degas — who, if I remember rightly, 
are still totally unrepresented in London 
[240] 



GALLERIES 

There are dozens of other Frenchmen of all 
sizes from Manet to Boudin and Cazin. Spain, 
Sweden, and, if we are really enterprising, 
Russia, wull provide something. It will not be 
necessary to buy anything German. Since 
Diii'er and Altdorfer it can only be supposed 
that German painters have written music. Len- 
bach was a good academic portrait painter; 
Menzel (whom they attempted to pass oif as a 
great master), a skilful, if dull, illustrator; the 
colour of the romantic Bocklin has to be seen 
to be believed; and the best of the living Ger- 
mans would not be conspicuous in our current 
art shows. We must be grateful for the new 
gallery; but I should like to add a few qualify- 
ing remarks. 

To illustrate the limitations of these huge 
public collections a parallel from literature may 
be drawn. They are like anthologies. The 
National Gallery resembles one of those works 
which give in five or ten volumes representative 
selections from the world's Greatest Masters, 
specimens drawn from all countries and periods. 
The Tate Gallery is like an anthology of nine- 
teenth century literature; the new Duveen Gal- 
lery will be like a volume of selections from 
-nodern foreign writers. Picture galleries have 
iisadvantages peculiar to themselves, of course. 

[241] 



LIFE AND LETTERS 

If they are overcrowded with pictures, one can- 
not escape the clash and confusion by " open- 
ing " a wall at one place and then shutting it 
up again; if they are overcrowded with people! 
concentration is difficult. And in the ordinary! 
way, so much trouble and time are involved 
in reaching them, that the visitor, not knowing 
when he will be there again, is faced with the 
necessity of either rushing through them oil 
getting tired limbs and a crick in the neck. Buij 
their principal defect as an element in " artistic 
education " is inseparable from their principal 
merit; they cover too much ground and they 
cover it inadequately. Large and, within their 
reference, " complete " anthologies are, like his-^ 
tories of literature, indispensable to those wh 
desire to find their way about. Without sue 
works we might never come into contact with 
those writers who are most likely to appeal to 
us. Were it not for the few examples of the 
early Flemings in the National Gallery many a' 
man might never have gone to Belgium and 
Berlin to see the Memlings and the van Eycks 
the Matsys and the Patinirs, the van der Wey- 
dens, Davids, and van der Goes. But you 
cannot get the fullest and the intensest pleasure 
out of Milton and Keats by reading the ex* 
amples of them, however numerous, in the 
[242] 



^ GALLERIES 

Oxford Book of English Verse; still less can 
you fully know and enjoy Vermeer or Man- 
tegna from one or two pictures in a National 
Gallery. It is highly desirable that we should 
have these enormous museums of pictures, in 
order that we may easily know the best that has 
been done in the world and discover, whether 
we are practising art or merely " consuming " it, 
our affinities. But it will be a bad thing if all 
the good pictures in the world get sprinkled 
evenly throughout the world's great galleries, 
each gallery achieving its aim of getting one or 
two examples of every good painter. 

Whenever I see even a single good picture 
well hung in a private house I reflect how much 
more pleasure I get out of it there than I should 
have done had I seen it amid the conflicting 
clamours of a heterogeneous public gallery. 
And it is surely a commonplace of observa- 
tion that an unusual degree of enjoyment is 
obtained at a gallery which is so fortunate as 
to possess a whole room, or a whole wall, of one 
artist's works. How much less effective would 
! the Giottos at Assisi be were they scattered 
throughout the capitals of Europe; how much 
more effective would the great Ghent altar- 
piece be if it were reunited instead cii being 
in pieces at Ghent, Brussels, and Berlin. No 

[243] 



LIFE AND LETTERS 

man can get the most out of Rubens, Velasquez 
or Turner unless he has seen the Rubenses at 
Antwerp or Munich, the Velasquez at the 
Prado, or the Turners at the Tate. Surely 
the ideal would be a dual system under which 
the great miscellaneous collections were sup- 
plemented by small, public collections devoted 
to particular artists or groups of artists. I do 
not know what sort of public gallery, if any, is 
owned by the City of Norwich. The only time 
I was ever there I saw the Cathedral and then 
found so admirable a hostelry that I was not 
tempted to explore further. But if it has one 
I am sure it would be much more delightful 
and useful were it entirely composed of the best 
works of old Crome and two or three other 
Norwich artists, than if it contained, like most 
provincial galleries, a mixture of minor local 
works, ephemeral academic successes and du- 
bious old masters, landscapes by Binks, poor 
copies of Titian and Palma Vecchio, and 
painted acres by Mr. Blair Leighton or Mr. 
Sigismund Goetze. We ought to diffuse our 
masterpieces as widely as possible without break- 
ing up the groups. And I don't think there is 
any doubt that a small town or a country place 
is a better setting for a one man gallery than 
a room or a separate building in a large city. 

[244] 



GALLERIES 

Three considerable collections exist of works 
by the late G. F. Watts. People differ, under- 
standably, about his eminence; but he will do as 
an illustration. There is the collection of por- 
traits in the National Portrait Gallery; there 
is the room full of allegories, including most of 
his major works at the Tate; and there is the 
miscellaneous gallery, filled mostly with small 
things, at his home near Guildford. For my- 
self I remember that when I visited the last, 
one small room in a village with trees all 
around and a haycart in the road, I got more 
pleasure out of it than I have ever got out of 
the others, which are surrounded with crowds 
of other pictures, and have to be approached 
! first through London streets and then through 
j, turnstiles laden with catalogues and guarded 
by braided commissionaires. I remember think- 
ing that had I my way I would shift half the 
Tate Wattses to Compton to join the others. 
Suppose that the cream of Constable were es- 
L tablished similarly at Flatf ord on the Stour, in 
h a little white building by the mill, where his own 
I river runs through his own valley. Suffolk 
would have an added attraction; Constable 
would be seen to better advantage than he 
ever has been; and a pilgrimage to Flatf ord 
would be as exciting as a visit to Haarlem, 

[245] 



LIFE AND LETTERS 

where, in a very small and otherwise not notable 
collection, one finds the great series of Halses, 
painted in and for his own town, and still there 
to his and the town's glory. Provincial towns 
beginning collections, and philanthropists mak- 
ing collections which they intend to leave to 
the public, would do well to bear this in mind. 
They should specialise; and where there is a 
local product worth it, they should specialise 
in that. 



[246] 



INITIALS 

Whenever a journalist wants to write some- 
thing, and lacks a peg, he invents a corre- 
spondent who (he states) " writes to " ask, 
point out, confirm, contradict, qualify, com- 
plain about, suggest, or urge something or other. 
I have done it myself. On this occasion, how- 
ever, the correspondent is a real one. He is real, 
and I have very great respect for him, although I 
have never seen him. And although the question 
he asks, the fact he points out, the practice he 
complains about, and the changes he suggests or 
urges, have in the first instance a purely per- 
sonal relation to myself, I feel justified in men- 
tioning it because it opens up larger issues. 

The correspondent says, in his mild and 
diffident way, " Why the hell do you sign your 
articles with initials ? " Initials, he argues, do 
not "get over the footlights"; they do not 
suggest a personality; they are not remember- 
able. " Surely your initials stand for some- 
thing. They did not christen you with initials. 
What does this 'J' represent?" A part of 
this contention I will admit frankly and without 

[247] 



LIFE AND LETTERS | 

hesitation. The custom of christening people 
with initials — although, I believe, long prevalent j 
in the United States, where X, Q, P, and Z | 
commonly do duty for a second name — has 
never caught hold in this country. " J " does 
stand for something. What is it? 

Well, it may be Jabez. It may be Joseph, 
James, Jonah, Jeremiah, Josiah, Jehu, Jero- 
boam, Jedediah, Jasper, Joshua, Jenkin, Joab, 
Jehoianim, Jehoahash, Jehosophat, or Jerub- 
babel. If it were Jerubbabel, I cannot deny 
that " Jerubbabel C. Squire " would " get over 
the footlights." It would be remembered by 
every man who had seen it, even casually on 
a bookstall, for one second; it might even hoist 
me into universal fame. On the other hand, 
if it were Jerubbabel, my motives for sup- 
pressing it would be obvious, and even universal 
fame and an enormous fortune may be pur- 
chased too dearly. But before we investigate 
its actual nature further, let us examine more 
closely this gentleman's general contentions. 

That you do get used to a name is certainly 
true, and the familiar name is as much part of 
an author's " publicity outfit " as is the trade 
name of a brand of sardines or stove-polish. 
A new play by Geo. B. Shaw would take some 
time fighting its way unless there were elaborate 

[248] 



INITIALS 

explanations (which there certainly would be if 
the change were made) by Mr. Bernard Shaw 
that this was his new style of address. " G. 
Keith Chesterton" might stand a chance; the 
author's surname is long and uncommon. But 
H. George Wells or Herbert G. Wells would 
be asking for neglect, and the name of Sir 
Thos. Caine on a new novel would be greeted 
by the public with stares of apathetic non- 
comprehension. But let it be observed that 
there is almost every sort of variety in the 
signatures by which these eminent men have 
already become known. Mr. Shaw customarily 
writes both his Christian names in full, or 
begins with an initial and writes the second 
name at length. Sir Hall Caine suppresses his 
first name and displays his second. And the 
other two confine themselves to initials. Yet 
I do not think it can fairly be said that Mr. 
Chesterton is obscure behind the " G. K." or 
that Mr. Wells has hid his light under bushels 
of "H. Gs." 

I think the truth of it is that initials stick 
just as well as names, but they take longer to 
stick. They take longer to stick because they 
have no intrinsic interest. They have no 
flavour. There are exceptions. Mr. Chester- 
ton has tm'ned the series " G. K. C." into a 

[249] 



LIFE AND LETTERS 

kind of word, with a tone of its own like any 
other word; and if an author arose who signed 
his name " G. K. Chatterton " or " G. K. 
Chipps," we should have prepossessions about 
him, expect certain things from him, and re- 
tain a memory of him if only with the result of 
confusing him with his initial-sake. Again, 
there are series of initials which have a wholly 
accidental individuality which makes them fix 
themselves at once. If a man's initials are 
" P. I. G." or " F. O. O. L." we neither forget 
it nor allow him to forget it; if the name at 
the head of this article were "A. S. Squire," I 
think it would get over the footlights all right. 
Its bray would be ringing in the reader's ears 
long after he had laid down the paper. But 
leaving exceptional cases out of account, 
initials, becoming pseudo-words by familiarity, 
differ among themselves in value and beauty 
just as words do. A mass of associations cling 
around them, and they have sound-sequences 
which affect us (we unconscious) just as the 
vowels and consonants in ordinary words do. 
Without knowing it, we probably dislike inno- 
cent initials which have been borne by people 
whom we have detested; without knowing it, 
we are enchanted with certain initials because 
they come trailing clouds of glory from the 
[250] 



INITIALS 

past or because they have a pleasant rippling 
sound. Here we get on to the influence of 
sounds. It is a difficult matter. All we can 
say is that other things being equal some words 
are more beautiful than others : all writers know 
this. But it is equally true that sound will not 
go all the way: that good associations may 
1 make ugly syllables seem beautiful and bad 
ones may make beautiful open vowels sound 
ugly. It is hard to detach the word from the 
p object. We have only to look at the word 
" Keats " to realise how horrible we should think 
it had Keats been a vulgar writer; and even the 
word " moon " would seem ugly if it con- 
|r noted something red and writhing in the entrails 
fc of a fish. You may test the truth of this by 
: experimenting with a word which can be used 
i in two very different senses. Such a word is 
" lights." To my ear it is not a pleasant- 
\ sounding word, merely as a word. But it can 
seem one thing and the other. Think of it in 
connection with all the beautiful lights in the 
world — the stars, candles in a great old cham- 
ber, the lights of a city seen from a great 
distance, the lights of cottages in a forest, or 
of dawn over the sea — and it seems a beautiful, 
soft, lingering word fit to be rhymed (as it 
always is) with " nights." Think of it as the 

[251] 



LIFE AND LETTERS 

name of those vague atrocities which are 
hawked in mean streets as " catsmeat," and it 
becomes a vile spluttering word fit only for that 
base use. But I wander. 

So let us return whence we started. There 
was one name that I omitted from that engag- 
ing list of designations beginning "J." There 
are no doubt others; but I haven't my old 
Testament with me. The name I refer to is 
John. It has been borne by many illustrious 
men and an innumerable multitude of the ob- 
scure. It was made glorious by John Milton, 
John Keats, John Donne, John Ford; and at 
various times it has renewed its lustre in John 
Ketch, King John, twenty-two Pope Johns, 
John Galsworthy, John Masefield, John Peel, 
John Corlett, John Smith, John Jones, John 
Robinson, and John Barleycorn. There was 
also Friar John, Brother John of the Funnels, 
doughtiest, thirstiest, and, very likely, most 
learned of all. There is no name like it. 
Fashions in other names come and go. Thomas 
and William slump and boom. Geralds, Lu- 
cians, Marmadukes, Susans, Peggys, jMargarets, 
Marjories, are the rage of a generation, and 
then become sickening to the palate. A countess 
digs up the name Gladys for her daughter; 
in ten years it covers the countiy; in another 
[252] 



INITIALS 

fifty it sinks into disrepute; and then it goes 
on flourishing in dark byways until some new 
explorer produces it once more as a fresh and 
radiant thing. But John goes on. From the 
ages when it was spelt Jehan to the present 
day the proportion of Johns to the total popu- 
lation has probably never fluctuated beyond one 
or two per cent. It is as fixed as the English 
landscape and the procession of the seasons. 
And, like sun, moon, and stars, roses and oaks, 
the yearly renewing miracle of the woods and 
the cornfields, it never becomes wearisome or 
tarnished. Time does not make stale its infinite 
sameness; the most fickle slaves in Fashion's 
retinue cannot contract a positive distaste for 
it; in its dignity, solidity, greenness and grave 
mystery, it defies the weakness of those who 
tire of all things. Nothing affects it; nothing 
can bring it into contempt; it stands like a 
rock amid the turbulent waves of human his- 
tory, as fine and noble a thing now as it was 
when it first took shape on human lips. It is 
a name to live up to; but if one w^ho bears it 
sinks into disrepute it falls not with him, but 
rather stays in the firmament above him, shin- 
ing down upon him like a reproachful star. 

But I do not see why I should say what my 
own name is if I don't want to. 

[253] 



RECITATION IN PUBLIC 

The other day there was given in London a 
public recitation of poetry. Eleven authors 
delivered passages from their own works to an 
audience of a hundred and fifty ladies who paid 
two guineas each, the money going to a charity. 
Perhaps I had better say nothing about the per- 
formance. Only this: That one of those gal- 
lantly endeavouring to get his verses off without 
referring to his book, got tied up towards the 
end. He left lines out, put lines in, got lines 
in the wrong order, and, being resolved not to 
break down, shamelessly vamped and gagged. 
Apparently the candour of his demeanour was 
such that nobody noticed. 

It is highly probable that these recitations 
will become a permanent institution, analogous 
to Chamber Concerts. The prevailing notion 
is that there is something ridiculous about 
standing up in public and reciting poetry. But 
all human actions are ridiculous, properly re- 
garded; and this one is certainly no more 
ridiculous than acting or playing the flute in 
[254] 



RECITATION IN PUBLIC 

public. Flute-players, in fact, are most ridicu- 
lous. It is quite evident that verse ought to 
be spoken aloud. If a man takes pains to 
make his work musical, it is more than ridicu- 
lous that it should never be heard save by the 
" inward ear." In earlier ages nobody ques- 
tioned this. When, as Mr. Kipling elegantly 
puts it: " 'Omer smote 'is bloomin' lyre," his 
lyre was merely the background of his declama- 
tion, and the finest early English poetry has 
reached us by oral transmission. When min- 
strels turned into authors recitation died — or, 
rather, was left to the unintelligent. In this 
country, until recently, the general craving to 
hear verse well spoken has been ministered to 
only by imbeciles, who, at bazaars and smoking 
concerts, make audiences shuffle uneasily in 
their seats while they roar Out with the Life- 
boat, Kissing Cup's B,ace, or Tennyson's 
The Bevenge. MiHions at functions in aid of 
the choir outing or at annual concerts of local 
literary societies must have heard this last, and 
felt their flesh creep as the orator leant forward 
and daintily fluttered his fingers when he came 
to " a pinnace like a fluttered bird came flying 
from far away." The poets themselves have 
abstained from public appearances. But their 
knowledge that recitation was better than silent 



LIFE AND LETTERS 

reading has usually led them to read aloud in 
private. Tennyson, " rolling out his hollow oes 
and aes," was heard by many, and Swinburne, 
as we now learn, would oblige if asked, and 
chant his compositions in a shrill voice which, at 
exciting points, rose into a scream. If, how- 
ever, good verse gains by being read aloud, it 
is obviously illogical to restrict such perform- 
ances to private houses: and in the last few 
years the recognition of this fact has spread. 
The revival is mainly due to Mr. Yeats, who 
thought out and perfected a technique of recita- 
tion and began giving readings from his own 
poems. To his inspiration was probably due 
the action of the proprietors of the Poetry 
Bookshop in Devonshire Street, who have for 
some years given recitals at regular and fre- 
quent intervals, amongst those who have ap- 
peared being Mr. Yeats, Mr. Hewlett, Mr. 
Masefield, Mr. Sturge Moore, and Rupert 
Brooke. The Americans, who have a passion 
for lectures of all sorts, have taken to arrang- 
ing tours of English poets ; two or three of them 
are there now, reading to immense audiences at, 
I hope, great profit to themselves. The prac- 
tice is going to grow. And for two reasons. 
One is that good recitation is artistically inter- 
esting : the other is that there will be money in it. 

[256] 



RECITATION IN PUBLIC 

Now there is, unhappily, no reason to sup- 
pose that because a man can write a musical 
thing, he will necessarily be a good reader. For 
instance, he might be dumb. Faihng that quite 
disabling infirmity, he may have a bad voice, 
he may have an imperfect control over his voice, 
he may have a physical appearance so unim- 
pressive that no amount of emotional force can 
counterbalance it, or he may be so reserved that 
he is quite unable to display his intimate feel- 
ings in public. It is one thing to wear your 
heart on your sleeve in print: and quite another 
to stand face to face with an audience and 
expose your tenderest emotions and noblest 
aspirations. If an author himself has the neces- 
sary histrionic gifts, voice, and audacity, he is 
the best person to hear, as he should know 
better than anyone else exactly the flow and 
stress of his language. But the important thing 
is not that we should hear the words spoken by 
the person who wrote them (if it were, recita- 
tions from dead poets would be impossible), but 
that they should be spoken by people with suffi- 
cient intelligence to understand them. Most 
Shakespearean actors do not understand Shakes- 
peare's verse, and have no idea whatever 
about rhythm. They either spout their lines 
with the mechanical regularity of a metronome, 

[257] 



LIFE AND LETTERS 

or gabble and garble them with the avowed 
object of making them resemble prose as closely 
as possible. What is wanted is a reciter with 
all a good poet's critical taste : one who, whether 
or not a practising artist himself, can give lan- 
guage and rhythms the values that the composer 
meant them to have. 

My observations at the recent performance 
led to several conclusions, which may be worth 
recording. One is that there is more in the 
technique of recitation than many good natural 
readers might suppose. A man may have 
all the necessary attributes of voice, under- 
standing, and emotional force; but there is 
room for study. This is especially so with 
poets. The line about Tennyson's " oes and 
aes " is significant. To a poet a musical line 
has a tendency to present itself as a succession 
of beautiful vowel sounds. Vowel sounds, in 
certain sequences, are beautiful. Properly 
enunciated, with right tonal inflexion, the syl- 
lables " la, la, la, la," may be delivered so as 
to produce quite melting effects. Why that is 
so may be left to Students of Evolution to 
determine; they will probably establish a con- 
nexion with the love-song of the megatherium 
to its mate; or the tuneful warnings addressed 
to the herd by the chief bull bison when he 

[258] 



RECITATION IN PUBLIC 

scented danger. At any rate, people who read 
musical verse aloud are apt to dwell so lovingly 
on the vowels that they forget to make the 
consonants clear: the word " bite " at the end of 
a line sounds to the audience like " bi." I think, 
again, that the lighting of the auditorium wants 
considering. However much in harmony the 
souls of the audience may be with the reciter, 
what he sees in a lighted room is not their souls 
but their hats : which are distracting. The dark- 
ened auditorium has its drawbacks: it makes 
one feel rather unnatural; and if it is accom- 
panied, as it is at the Poetry Bookshop, by 
lighted candles on the platform, it produces so 
ecclesiastical an atmosphere that the audience 
dare not applaud or laugh without a sense of 
sin or at least solecism. 

But the most important thing is this: that if 
the Art of Recitation is to have a fair chance, 
it should be understood that to get much out 
of a recital you ought — unless the subject mat- 
ter is very simple — to be fairly familiar before- 
hand with the works recited. The ordinary 
concert-goer does not expect to " take in " a 
new symphony properly the first time he hears 
it; and he habitually gets most of his pleasure 
out of hearing again things that he has heard 
before. You do not follow verses half so well 

[259] 



LIFE AND LETTERS 

the first time you hear them as you do 
the first time you read them: the ear cannot 
take the sort of instantaneous survey that the 
eye takes. The simplest poem, if unfamihar, 
sounds obscure when read aloud. Finally, it 
is, I think, evident that a programme with sev- 
eral names on it is better than a programme 
filled by a single executant. One man's voice — 
in a public as in a private room — if heard for 
two consecutive hours, almost inevitably re- 
duces one to a condition of mental coma if it 
does not actually send one to sleep. 

These remarks are, I know, fragmentary. 
But nobody who has heard good recitation 
could fail to appreciate the unexploited possi- 
bihties of the craft. And if it develops it will 
have the incidental advantage of supplying 
poets with incomes. Homer sang probably in 
the open air, and got nothing but his keep. But 
two-guinea seats, or even five-shilling ones, 
mean something; and even if the authors do 
not themselves recite and do not even get a 
percentage on proceeds, there never was so 
effective a form of advertisement of their books. 
The greatest trouble with good modern litera- 
ture has been to make people who would like it 
aware of its existence. 

[260] 



HUMANE EDUCATION 

It is evident that we are in for a prolonged 
struggle about education. Everybody is 
agreed — except the dwindling minority who 
have a sentimental preference for iUiterate and 
deferential simpletons — that the quality and 
quantity of our education must be improved 
after the war. But there is a violent divergence 
of opinion as to what " improvement " is, what 
sort of things we are increasingly to teach. 
Strong sections of industrials who still imagine 
that men can be mere machines and are at their 
best as machines if they are mere machines are 
already menacing what they call " useless " edu- 
cation. They deride the classics, and they are 
mildly contemptuous of history, philosophy, and 
English. They want our educational institu- 
tions, from the oldest University to the young- 
est elementary school, to concentrate on busi- 
ness or the things that are patently useful in 
business. Technical instruction is to be pro- 
vided for adolescent artisans; bookkeeping and 
shorthand for prospective clerks; and the 

[261] 



LIFE AND LETTERS 

cleverest we are to set to " business methods," 
to modern languages (which can be used in cor- 
respondence with foreign firms), and to science 
(which can be applied to industry). French 
and German are the languages, not of Mon- 
taigne and Goethe, but of Schmidt Brothers, 
of Elberfeld, and Dupont et Cie., of Lyons. 
Chemistry and physics are not explorations into 
the physical constitution of the universe, but 
sources of new dyes, new electric light fila- 
ments, new means of making things which 
can be sold cheap and fast to the Nigerian 
and the Chinese. For Latin there is a 
limited field so long as the druggists in- 
sist on retaining it in their prescriptions. 
Greek has no apparent use at all, unless it be 
as a source of syllables for hybrid names of 
patent medicines and metal polishes. The soul 
of man, the spiritual basis of civilsation — what 
gibberish is that? 

It is against blind and ruinous bigotry of 
that kind that Professor Gilbert Murray has 
written his Religio Grammatici (Allen & 
Unwin). Professor Murray is a Professor of 
Greek, He has spent most of his life studying 
Greek, and is openly unrepentant. Lest it be 
supposed that he is merely — a thing frequently 
suggested of those who support the ancient 
[262] 



HUMANE EDUCATION 

tongues — defending his own vested interests, it 
may be added that were Greek forbidden by a 
Defence of the Realm Act regulation produced 
by some Business Government of the future, 
he would be equally competent as a Professor 
of English. At all events, his present plea is 
not a plea for Greek and Latin exclusively. 
He argues, with reason, that we are mainly 
what we are and know most of what we know 
because the Greeks and Latins, pagan and 
Christian, lived before us. With them w^e find 
the origins of our religious and political insti- 
tutions, of our literature, to a great extent of 
our language, of our mathematics, mechanics, 
law, and morals. Whatever the percentage of 
Jute and Angle blood in us, we are not the 
children of the Jutes. The Germans them- 
selves, who have far more Teutonic blood in 
them, do not draw from Teutonic sources such 
things as they have in common with civilised 
Europe, and when the ex-Kaiser exhorted the 
youths of Germany to be " little Germans, not 
little Greeks and Romans," he was asking them 
to cut away the ground they stand on. In 
Aristophanes and Horace we find (with local 
differences) ourselves; in Beowulf we find some- 
thing remote and savage, much more alien from 
ourselves, thinking and feeling in strange cate- 

[263] 



LIFE AND LETTERS 

gories, and talking in language most remarkably 
strange. 

Professor Murray, however, in urging the 
retention of the classics as an element in educa- 
tion, does not make the mistake (made often 
by their supporters and always by their oppo- 
nents) of treating them as a separate and 
peculiar thing. He regards them as part — 
though a very large part — of our past, as Euro- 
peans, and of the past of the human race as a 
whole. As such, they have — and the advan- 
tages they offer are shared, in varying degree, 
by all literary and historical studies — great ad- 
vantages to offer. They offer to the individual 
what is at lowest a continual source of enjoy- 
ment and entertainment, and at highest much 
more. Professor Murray says that pure sci- 
ence offers " an escape from the world about 
him, an escape from the noisy present into a 
region of facts which are as they are, and not 
as foolish human beings want them to be; an 
escape from the commonness of daily happen- 
ings into the remote world of high and severely 
trained imagination; an escape from mortality 
in the service of a growing and durable pur- 
pose, the progressive discovery of " truth." 
That is the literary man's tribute to a 
mode of intellectual discovery which is not 

[264] 



HUMANE EDUCATION 

his; of the mode which is his he speaks 
thus: 

" ' The Philistine,' the vulgarian, the Great 
Sophist, the passer of base coin for true, he 
is all about us and, worse, he has his outposts 
inside us, persecuting our peace, spoiling our 
sight, confusing our values, making a man's 
self seem greater than the race and the present 
thing more important than the eternal. From 
him and his influence we find our escape by 
means of the Grammata into that cahn world 
of theirs, where stridency and clamour are for- 
gotten in the ancient stillness, where the strong 
iron is long since rusted and the rocks of granite 
broken into dust, but the great things of the 
human spirit still shine like stars pointing 
Man's way onward to the great triumph or the 
great tragedy, and even the little things, the 
beloved and tender and funny and familiar 
things, beckon across gulfs of death and change 
with a magic poignancy, the old things that our 
dead leaders and forefathers loved, viva adhuc 
et desiderio pulcriora (Living still and more 
beautiful because of our longing) ." 

But let us be more " practical." Literary 
records being in the main the records of con- 

[265] 



LIFE AND LETTERS 

spicuous men and conspicuous races, their study 
offers the spiritual and intellectual examples 
which are a perpetual source of new effort. 
The virtues, without which great new enterprise 
(even commercial enterprise) cannot be carried 
through, are not so common all round us that 
we can spare the contemplation of the great 
achievements of the dead. As Professor Mur- 
ray suggests, progress in historical times has 
consisted, as far as we can tell, in the accumula- 
tion of knowledge and material objects; we 
cannot afford to neglect Pericles and St. 
Francis merely because they never used a tele- 
phone. Sir Philip Sidney — scarcely the type 
of the spectacled and ineffective recluse — said 
that he never heard the old Ballad of Chevy 
Chase, but his heart was stirred as it were by a 
trumpet. Take the humblest examples: Bruce 
and the Spider, which has been set before scores 
of millions of British children. It had its uses, 
though it taught the " pedestrian virtue of 
pertinacity." It may be that the Great Film, 
or the Man who Saved the Empire, will be 
deemed in the future adequate substitute for 
that anecdote; but even that is historical edu- 
cation, literary education, education which 
(whatever utility it may have to others) can- 
not be supposed to increase the ability of those 
[266] 



HUMANE EDUCATION 

who see it to earn their own living save in so 
far as it gives them not technical, but moral, 
assistance. And, finally, if you are to think 
about the future, your " conjectures will not be 
much good unless you have in some way 
studied other places and other ages." All liter- 
ature is, in a sense, social science ; we learn from 
it what men are, what can be done with them, 
where they have failed, where and under what 
conditions they have succeeded. 

All this is trite, and has been said (though 
not so well as by Professor Murray) ten thou- 
sand times. Nevertheless, in INIr. Chesterton's 
old image, the wall will go black if you don't 
keep on whitewashing it. The world at this 
moment contains a great many people who 
think — or, rather, think they think, or, rather, 
talk as if they thought they thought — that man 
exists for the two only purposes of producing 
goods, and more men to eat and wear them; 
and who talk also as though our little life 
were not rounded by a sleep, with something 
beyond it. They will be on the ramp when the 
world settles down; the dons (who feel very 
solitary and timid and unsupported) may not 
realise how much backing they can command if 
they only begin to fight; and some supporters 
of the humanities ridiculously and disastrously 

[267] 



LIFE AND LETTERS 

argue as if Greek and Latin were the only in- 
dispensables and the endowment of scientific 
research somehow incompatible with them. 
They would be better advised to yield a little as 
to compulsory classics, and to endeavour to 
secure that if Greek and Latin be not com- 
pulsorily studied, then the literature and history 
of England should be. We should never have 
had half the uproar about the classics if their 
more pedantic and conventional champions had 
not systematically ignored the claims of Eng- 
lish, which is, after all, even more important for 
us than Latin and Greek. It is a good thing 
to know Homer, but it is preposterous for an 
Englishman to know Homer and never to have 
opened Chaucer. If the humanities are to be 
saved, the ground of defence will have to be 
shifted a little. 



[268] 



A SUBJECT 

T Going into the country for a week-end (with- 
out the least intention of beginning this page 
bestially with a participle), I found that I had 
left at home the book which I had intended to 
review. Had it been a book of argument, that 
need not have been much of a difficulty; for I 
could have mentioned the book's name and then 
argued with and about everybody else who had 
ever dealt with the matter under consideration. 
But it was a collection of letters, and you can- 
not review a collection of letters without quot- 
ing from them, or, at least, reading them: that 
is, unless you are cleverer than I am or more 
impudent than I dare to be. The result was 
that I found myself with " nothing to write 
about." 

The situation must be a familiar one to every 
routine writer; and I conceive that all men meet 
it in the same way. They wish that they had 
gone to the Straits Settlements to plant rubber 
at Kuala Lumpur or some such place; or that 
they had become doctors or professional sol- 

[269] 



LIFE AND LETTERS 

cliers; or that they had gone into the Civil 
Service, or that they had jumped at that open- 
ing on the Stock Exchange. They madden 
those around them with their querulous com- 
plaints, beneath which there seems to be an 
implication that it is a monstrous injustice that 
a subject has not been provided by family, 
or friends, or rained down from heaven by 
Providence. They sit down, get up, walk 
about, pull their hair, pick up papers and look 
at them, open books and begin to read, though 
they know time presses, smoke pipes and ciga- 
rettes alternately, spill ashes, talk jerkily to 
dogs and cats, wish they were rich, write head- 
lines in a fair, round hand, draw faces, and put 
down words like " The," " Everybody " (and 
"Going"), in the hope that they will start 
trains of thought — or, at any rate, trains of 
words, which are the next best thing. The 
clock ticks on as remorselessly as it did to 
Faustus; the time of train or post approaches; 
the game seems up; suicide presents itself as a 
remedy for life's ills; reason interposes that 
the worst troubles can be survived; and in the 
end something happens. As a fact, no editor 
ever gets letters from regular essayists saying, 
" Excuse me this week, I have no ideas." The 
[270] 



A SUBJECT 

pressure of necessity forces the door and some- 
thing rushes in. 

So it was with what I was long ago warned 
not to call " oneself." I had told myself 
twenty times that I had nothing to write about ; 
I had ransacked my memory in vain for frag- 
ments of some recent intelligent conversation 
which might have raised some literary problem 
of interest; I had searched several papers and 
many shelves for something which might appear 
capable of exposition or dispute; I had finally 
sat down in a sulk; and then an Inner Voice re- 
peated " nothing to write about " in tones of 
contempt. Justly; for what nonsense it was! 
To begin with, there is " Nothing " itself, a sub- 
ject which has not been exhausted, though it 
has been glorified by a dead poet and a living 
essayist. And, apart from nothing, there is any- 
thing and everything else, including (as was 
long ago observed) a broomstick. A change 
came over my brain, and I felt suddenly as 
though I could write, with equal fecundity, on 
anything in the world. My mind, my body, the 
room, the landscape, the sky, the universe instan- 
taneously became crowded with subjects all 
clamouring to be investigated. 

That is what is known as the awakening of 
the imagination, a process that may take place 

[271] 



LIFE AND LETTERS 

in all sorts of ways : that may be brought about 
by a word, a sound, a scent, a drink. The world, ' 
that seemed a collection of lifeless matter, is 
suddenly invested with wonder ; all things spring 
to life and are clothed with infinite associations; 
every object recovers its history and its mystery 
— which is history undisclosed. Every shape 
and colour acquires interest, every aspect of 
every object asks questions. Here, at this mo- 
ment, I look at my hand, my moving hand. I 
see it as the slave of will, the prodigious gar- 
ment of soul; as a concourse of chemicals drawn 
together by unimaginable forces; as the heir of 
innumerable ancestors, paws and claws and ten- 
drils. I pore over the elevations and depres- 
sions, the nails and the little hairs, the pits 
whence the little hairs grow, the ribs and wrin- 
kles of the skin, never the same on any two hu- 
man hands. I think of chiromancj^ and wonder 
how began the human belief that a man's fate 
was written on his hands; who it was named 
those thin, pink streaks and girdles by the names 
of Life and Venus and Mars; and why so re- 
markable a doctrine should have started if there 
was no truth in it. How interesting it would be 
to pursue that speculation, to meditate on it and 
to examine the reflections of other men on it, 
of the ancients, of Paracelsus perhaps, of mod- 
[272] 



A SUBJECT 

€rn doctors. The mind travels to Bertillon and 

Scotland Yard; to finger-prints on windows and 

woodwork; to greasy and bloody finger-prints; 

P to counter-detective work ; to gloves. At that 

1 word gloves, all the gloves in the world soar 

■■ into sight : velvet gloves, the gauntlet of the 

King's champion, the glove that the heartless 

j Prench lady flung among the lions for the 

. seigneur to pick up, gloves to which men have 

written songs, gloves of an ancient fashion kept 

in lavender with faded letters. And, returning, 

I think of metaphorical hands, of the hands of 

fate and the hands of destiny; of symbolical 

hands, of clouds no bigger than a man's hand, 

. of finger-posts and pointers; of sculptured 

hands, the giant hand of Rodin; of real hands, 

hands long dust. Queen Mary's, and Alexander's 

that curbed Bucephalus; of Lady Macbeth's 

little hand from which no waters could wash the 

stain, of the white hands of Iseult of Brittany, 

and the pale hands that the ghosts stretched out 

across Acheron. 

How easy it would be to write a large book 
about hands; how impossible to exhaust their 
beauties and their strangenesses, their diversity 
and multitude of their works. But why linger 
on the hand? There is the pen also. It is a 
fountain-pen, and has to be dipped continually 

[273] 



LIFE AND LETTERS 

in an inkpot; but, though degenerate as an indi- 
vidual, it is the scion of a wonderful race. Its 
very name is history in a crystal, and memorises 
the wing of the goose with strong quills. Steel 
pens and gold pens, now dominant, are but 
newcomers; the stylus had a longer and a wider 
reign; there is also the brush, which the Chinese 
— whose ink the French call cliinois and we 
Indian — prefer; there are also fingers, which, 
used by prisoners and dying travellers for writ- 
ing messages in their own blood, have estab- 
lished a peculiarly intimate link between the 
hand and the pen. Then, the characters of pens, 
their racial peculiarities and habits; the broad 
pens, the fine pens, the new pen that refuses to 
take ink, the old one that is encrusted; the wil- 
fulness of the pen that crosses; the mania of 
pens for the collection of hairs ; the difficulties of 
removing such hairs; smudges; blots; the prob- 
lem of what size blot really matters, and when. 
Here, in looking at the operation of writing, 
we come upon a large area of human life and 
activity; yet who has explored it and analysed 
its content? One thinks into it like a man dig- 
ging in a cave ; the more one discovers the larger 
the surface exposed to research. 

I come to the ink. How is it made? I don*t 
know; if I looked it up in the encyclopaedia, I 

[274] 



I A SUBJECT 

should find a whole article about that. I fancy 
that gall and lamp-black come in. What is gall ? 
What things have been done with ink! How 
much ink has been shed by journalists in noble 
causes! How pathetic is the yellowness of old 
ink ! How true is that observation of the anony- 
mous Caroline that we should have very little 
to drink if all the sea were ink. A great vista 
opens up from ink. 

The pen, the ink, the table-cloth (black and 
white check) ; paper; a blue bowl full of odd- 
ments; a window; brick chimneys; bare elms; a 
mottled sky. Below, a garden and plants in 
winter sleep; a pond where fat goldfish used to 
be, and probably still are, waving to and fro 
with gaping and closing mouths, amid a green 
growth, hiding under flat leaves, diving out of 
sight, rising bright to the surface. Fields, farms, 
churches, trains, towns, London, the sea. Each 
word is the head of a comet with an infinite tail 
of coloured light. I am humiliated at the vari- 
ety and splendour of things and ashamed of my 
own dullness. Never again, I say, shall I feel 
that there is nothing to write about. . . . 

But I shall. 



[275] 



GOAKS AND HUMOUR 

There are a great many books about Wit and 
Humour. Hobbes thought one laughed be- 
cause one felt superior; Bergson thinks that the 
comic is always the animate imitating the me- 
chanical ; and Kant thought something else, 1 1 
forget what. The last treatise I read was by the \ 
German Professor Freud, who appeared anx- \ 
ious to prove that wit and humour are a kind of j 
sexual perversions. But I still do not under- 1 
stand what they are, and I have something 
better to do than make my head ache by at- i 
tempting to invent satisfactory, or even unsat- | 
isfactory, definitions of them. If it is difficult 
to define wit and humour, it is equally difficult 
to discriminate precisely between the humour 
of one nation and the humour of another. There 
certainly are differences. But probably there 
is no special form of joke that can be appre- 
ciated by every American, and by no English- 
man, or vice-versa. And there is a great deal 
of American humorous writing which might 
have been done by Englishmen. We are accus- 

[276] 



GOAKS AND HUMOUR 

! tomed to think of our humour, at its best, as a 
quieter and wiser thing, urbane and sympathetic. 
But Washington Irving and Holmes are (sub- 
ject matter apart) as English as Lamb, if those 
are our qualities; and many other Americans, in 
some ways very Transatlantic (O. Henry and 
Twain are examples), are masters of the richer 
and deeper humour as well as of the other sort. 
Bret Harte's Condensed Novels, again, might 
have been written by a very restrained Euro- 
pean parodist. And when Thoreau said that 
" the profession of doing good is full," and 
Ambrose Bierce defined a bottle-nose as " A 
nose fashioned in the image of its Maker," their 
mots were in the traditional European mould. 
There are, however, kinds of humour in which 
the Americans have specialised; the body of 
American humorous literature is as peculiar as 
it is extensive. We have had practitioners in 
dialect and humorous bad spelling; but there is 
a difference between them and Josh Billings, 
Artemus Ward, who invented the Goak, and 
Mr. Dooley. We have had humorous travellers, 
but they are not like Mark Twain. Where lies 
the difference? 

American humour, of the distinctively Amer- 
ican sort, gains something from the peculiar 
flavour of the American dialect. There was a 

[277] 



LIFE AND LETTERS j 

man who travelled in a sleeping car on a rail- 
way. During the night he was annoyed by ver- 
min, and he wrote to the headquarters of the 
company to complain. He received back from 
the administrative head a letter of immense 
effusiveness. Never before had such a com- 
plaint been lodged against this scrupulously 
careful line, and the management would have 
suffered any loss rather than cause annoyance 
to so distinguished a citizen as, etc., etc. He 
was very delighted with this abject apology. 
But as he was throwing away the envelope there 
fell out a slip of paper, which had, apparently, 
been enclosed by mistake. On it was a memo- 
randum: " Send this guy the bug-letter." One 
need not explain how this joke gains from the 
peculiarity of the language. (It has incidentally 
another feature which is traditionally a charac- 
teristic of much American humour — namely, 
iaconicism. All nations have their laconics; but 
brevity has always been a popular cult in the 
U. S. A. A typical example both of this and 
of an equally common habit of allusiveness is 
the remark of the Yankee at the Zoo, who, for 
the first time in his life, saw a giraffe. He 
looked at it long and hard, and then observed: 
"I don't believe it.") The language does give 
a tinge to American jests: and, naturally, an 

[278] 



GOAKS AND HUMOUR 

. even more important element is the sum of 
American social conditions and history. The 
unique circumstances of American life are di- 
rectly responsible to some of the striking things 
about American humour. 

A noticeable thing about American humour 
— one doesn't mean merely the efforts of a few 
prominent humorists — is the range it covers. 
Few things are sacred, and few are too serious 
to be jested about. Cutting loose from Europe 
and all its traditions (the breach here is rather 
closing up than widening), and living in a new 
country, where the normal life was adventurous 
and changeful, and anything might turn up at 
any moment, the American developed a curious 
detachment. With this came a philosophic 
whimsicality, which treated everything lightly 
and saw everything on the comic plane. We in 
Europe have all sorts of taboos. We are seri- 
ous about many things; and if we are serious 
about a thing we do not (unless we are excep- 
tional people) jest about it. The normal Amer- 
ican humorist jests about everything (however 
strongly he may feel about it), from his wife 
downwards. He will even make jests about mil- 
lionaires, a thing which to most Englishmen 
seems shocking. If you detach yourself suffi- 
ciently from things, everything on earth will 

[279] 



LIFE AND LETTERS 

appear a little comic, as indeed it is. This habit 
of standing outside things has been general in 
America. When Artemus Ward wrote his let- 
ter to the Prince of Wales: " Friend Wales — 
You remember me. I saw you in Canady a 
few years ago. I remember you too. I seldom 
forgit a person. . . . Of course, now you're 
married you can eat onions," he was not merely 
the Republican being familiar with the Royal 
Prince: he was doing what he would have done 
to the Head of his own State. Even a Repub- 
lican Englishman would probably have been 
slightly shocked by such irreverence. It was an 
American, again, who discovered that " the cow 
is an animal with four legs, one at each corner." 
As a scientific fact this, I need scarcely say, had 
been long known : but it took a new pair of eyes 
to see it precisely in this way. 

A European of Mark Twain's abilities and 
position would scarcely have written his book 
about the Court of King Arthur. We have too 
many inhibitions. They are great and small. 
But the American habit of putting remarks in a 
whimsical, humorous form, whatever they are, 
and whatever the occasion, is so widespread that 
one often finds Americans of the most sober 
and humorless kind putting things humorously 
out of sheer force of national habit. An English 
[280] 



GOAKS AND HUMOUR 

employee, giving his employer notice, will either 

say that he cannot stand this place any 

longer or else apologise in an embarrassed way 
for causing inconvenience. The American is 
more likely to come up with a normal expression 
and observe, " Say, Doc, if you know anybody 
who wants my job, he can have it." Everything 
is susceptible of humour; and the more extrava- 
gant the humour, the better. American humour 
is, strictly speaking, pervasive. The lecturer 
who announced on his programme that he was 
" compelled to charge one dollar for reserved 
seats, because oats, which two years ago cost 30 
cents per bushel, now cost one dollar; hay is also 
one dollar 75 cents per cwt., formerly 50 cents," 
was carrying his systematic high spirits into a 
place where few British entertainers would have 
thought of being funny. It all springs from the 
state of mind which led, some years ago, to the 
formation of Smile Clubs, institutions that no 
other people would have dreamed of. Jocosity 
is the best policy. 

There is an American story about a man who 
invented a pneumatic life-saving device, to be 
attached to the body when jumping from a win- 
dow during a fire. He announced an exhibition 
test. He sprang from the top of a sky-scraper, 
and then " he bounced and bounced and bounced 

[281] 



LIFE AND LETTERS 

until we had to shoot him to save him from death 
by starvation." There is another about a dis- 
pute between two fishermen as to the relative 
size of fish in their respective waters. Smaller 
fry having been catalogued, one man said that 
he once, when after very large tarpon, got a 
whale : to be met by the blase repartee, " In my 
State, sir, we bait with whales." And there is 
another (where it comes from, I forget), about 
two brothers who went out hunting with two 
rifles and a single bullet, and brought the bullet 
home after killing a hundred head of buffalo. 
Their method was this. They were very crack 
shots, and they used to stand one on each side 
of the doomed beast. The bullet was fired by 
one brother, went through the victim, and was 
received by the muzzle of the other brother's 
rifle. An Englishman, hearing these stories, 
would know where they had come from. We 
can appreciate them, but we do not as a rule 
make them. We illustrate the qualities of men 
and things by telling lies about them, but we 
do not tell such thumping big ones. Our fishing 
stories are only slightly over the borders of the 
credible; a foolish person might be taken in by 
them: the American ones are such lies that nar- 
rators have no hope that even the most innocent 
will believe them. This obvious difference be-* 
[282] 



GOAKS AND HUMOUR 

f tween the usual American and the usual Eng- 
lish method of treating a thing humorously may- 
be illustrated by examples. Ten years ago, or 
so, the London, Chatham and Dover Railway 
reached its nadir, and all British humorists were 

^ making jokes about the slowness of the trains. 
Some of these jokes were, for us, fairly drastic: 
the summit of achievement was reached, I think, 
by a report that a cow had met its death by 
charging an L. C. D. express from behind, and 
that the directors, at an emergency meeting, 
had decided to place cow-catchers at the rear 
end of all trains. But try to imagine what 
would have been said had the London, Chatham 
and Dover Railway been in America. The most 
luxuriant of our conceptions would have been 
feeble compared with the miracles of metaphor 
that would have been coined to show the ex- 
traordinary slowness of those trains. In Ameri- 
can descriptions they would not have gone at a 
walking pace, they would not even have crawled 
at a snail's: at their fastest the snails would 
have overtaken them, and mostly they would 
positively have gone backwards so that passen- 
gers would be compelled, aiming at a certain 
destination, to board trains ostensibly proceed- 
ing in the opposite direction. Now I think of 
it, I do seem to remember something about a 

[283] 



LIFE AND LETTERS 

cow boarding a train and biting the passengers. 
This delight in giving the extra turn of the 
screw that destroys the last shred of verisimili- 
tude for the sake of a fantastic effect is to be 
seen everywhere in American humorous writing, 
and one may take an illustration from the other 
side at random. Mr. Stephen Leacock's de- 
scription of how he tried to borrow a match from 
a man in the street will do. The account throws 
light on a common experience, and the various 
stages of the man's struggle with his pockets 
and production of toothpicks and other articles 
from his coat-tails whilst his parcels fall all 
round, might have been done by an Englishman. 
But in the end he cannot help rounding it off by 
a piece of sheer gusto that would scarcely have 
occurred to anyone but an American. Full of 
compassion at the would-be match-lender's state 
of desperation, the author puts an end to his 
suffering by throwing him under a tram — that 
is to say, a "trolley-car." Mr. Leacock hap- 
pens to be a Canadian and not a citizen of the 
United States. But in this regard they share 
the same tastes and the same habits. 

In fact, as has been said ten thousand times 
before, they love Exaggeration. All little Amer- 
ican communities in the old days had Charac- 
ters of whom they were proud: and the Char- 

[284] 



GOAKS AND HUMOUR 

acter was almost always an abnormal Exaggera- 
tor or Vituperator — which comes to the same 
thing. He was a man with a fine flow of the 
extravagant or the grotesque; in other words, 
a Champion Liar. The pleasure that such 
artists take in their work is the pleasure of the 
fantastic embroiderer or the mediaeval carver of 
gargoyles. American essays in the Preposter- 
ous are of various sorts. Continually one gets 
the monstrously absurd simile, or the mild over- 
statement of a single fact. All American funny 
men make a practice of this. It usually becomes 
a habit with them; they state everything in this 
form. Mark Twain's ordinary level is typified 
by " Twins amount to a permanent riot. And 
there isn't any real difference between triplets 
and an insurrection " — which is rather tired and 
mechanical. 

O. Henry, a writer vv^ho is far more than a 
jester, was very good in this way. One may 
quote from his account of the Mayor who was 
lying ill in bed, with what seemed a grave stom- 
achic complaint: "He was making internal 
noises that would have had everybody in San 
Francisco hiking for the parks." I suppose 
one is forced to explain, for the benefit of the 
forgetful British reader, that the population of 
San Francisco lives in dread of earthquakes. 

[28s] 



LIFE AND LETTERS 

But the more admirable kind of invention is the 
impossibility upon a larger scale; the calculated 
and nicely-worked out mendacity which, in pro- 
portion to its gross incredibility, is worked out 
with the highest attainable degree of simplicity 
and gravity, the frankly absurd story which is 
told you as the state of the weather or your 
grandmother's health might be told you. In 
the perfection of this species we have, I think, 
the finest achievement of American humour. 

Max Adder's famous account of the poet who 
was engaged to write In Memoriam verses to 
go in the obituary column of the local paper 
and brought the mob of infuriated parents down 
upon the editor's head is an early approach to 
this style. It is monstrously impossible: but it 
is conducted with a considerable amount of re- 
straint. Later authors have gone further in the 
self-suppression which eschews the incidental 
auctorial intervention or flamboyance of phrase, 
for the sake of the whole story. Mark Twain 
frequently did this sort of thing with great cir- 
cumspection. For instance, the dialogue with 
the Chief of detectives in The Stolen White Ele- 
phant. The detective wants to know what the 
missing animal usually eats : 

" * Now, what does this elephant eat, and how 
much? ' 
[286] 



GOAKS AND HUMOUR 

" ' Well, as to what he eats — he will eat any- 
thing. He will eat a man, he will eat a Bible — 
he will eat anything between a man and a Bible.' 

" ' Good — very good indeed, but too general. 
Details are necessary — details are the only valu- 
able things in our trade. Very well — as to men. 
^ At one meal ! — or, if you prefer, during one 
day — how many men will he eat, if fresh ? ' 

" ' He would not care whether they were fresh 
or not; at a single meal he would eat five ordi- 
nary men.' 

"'Very good; five men; we will put that 
down. What nationalities would he prefer ? ' 

" ' He is indifferent about nationalities. He 
prefers acquaintances, but is not prejudiced 
against strangers.' 

" ' Very good. Now as to Bibles. How many 
Bibles would he eat at a meal ? ' 

" ' He would eat an entire edition.' 

" ' It is hardly succinct enough. Do you 
mean the ordinary octavo, or the family illus- 
trated?' 

" ' I think he would be indifferent to illustra- 
tions; that is, I think, he would not value illus- 
trations above simple letter-press.' 

" ' No, you do not get my idea. I refer to 
bulk. The ordinary octavo Bible weighs about 
two pounds and a half, while the great quarto 

[287] 



LIFE AND LETTERS 

with the illustrations weighs ten or twelve. How 
many Dore Bibles would he eat at a meal? ' 

" ' If you knew this elephant, you could not 
ask. He would take what they had.' 

Well, put it in dollars and cents, then. 
We must get at it somehow. The Dore costs 
a hundred dollars a copy, Russian leather, bev- 
elled.' 

" ' He would require about fifty thousand dol- 
lars' worth — say an edition of five hundred 
copies.' 

" ' Now that is more exact. I will put that 
down. Very well; he likes men and Bibles; so 
far, so good.' ..." 

That is businesslike; that is sober realism. 
Given the leading idea everything is related with 
complete propriety. The elaboration of it was 
clearly a labour of love to its author. 

A more modern instance is Mr. Ellis Parker 
Butler's Pigs is Pigs, a short storj^ which may 
or may not have been published in this country. 
A pair of guinea-pigs are transported from one 
town to another by an Express Delivery Com- 
pany. An obstinate official insists in charging 
thirty cents a head on them, the rate for pigs; 
an equally obstinate consignee refuses to pay 
more than the twenty-five cents due on pets. 
[288] 



GOAKS AND HUMOUR 

Pending agreement the guinea-pigs are left in 
the office. The man-in-charge writes to head- 
quarters about it, and causes great bewilder- 
ment by mentioning two animals in his first 
letter, eight in his second, and 32 in his third. 
The struggle continues (an enormous bill for 
cabbage-leaves being run up) until the office 
is one large range of hutches and the guinea- 
pigs number very many thousands. The man 
has only to step (or rather creep, for there is 
little space) into the street for five minutes, 
and on his return he finds that there are a hun- 
dred more. This story is told with perfect 
composure: there is only one joke in it, and 
that is the whole story. The effect of this kind 
of thing is the effect of parody. It is parody of 
life and close to the humour of Butler's Ere- 
whon. No one can equal the American humorist 
at it. The Americans — I use the word in the 
most complimentary sense — are the greatest 
liars in Creation. 

Professor Leacock, in his essay upon Ameri- 
can Humour, says: "Essays upon American 
Humour after an initial effort towards the dig- 
nity and serenity of literary criticism, generally 
resolve themselves into the mere narration of 
American jokes and stories. The fun of these 
runs thinly towards its impotent conclusion, till 

[289] 



LIFE AND LETTERS 

the disillusioned reader detects behind the mask 
of the literary theorist the anxious grin of the 
secondhand story-teller." How untrue that is; 
and how unfair. 

In order to get back on him for his gratui- 
tous malice, I shall steal from his Literary 
Lapses a final example of his great gift of mak- 
ing an idiot of himself. He sets himself to 
consider whether or not the bicycle is a nobler 
animal than the horse. 

" I find that the difference between the horse 
and the bicycle is greater than I had supposed. 

" The horse is entirely covered with hair ; the 
bicycle is not entirely covered with hair, ex- 
cept the '89 model they are usmg in Idaho. 

" In riding a horse the performer finds that 
the pedals in which he puts his feet will not 
allow of a good circular stroke. He will ob- 
serve, however, that there is a saddle in which — 
especially while the horse is trotting — he is ex- 
pected to seat himself from time to time. But 
it is simpler to ride standing up with the feet 
in the pedals. 

" There are no handles to a horse, but the 
1910 model has a string to each side of its face 
for turning its head when there is anything you 
want it to see. 
[290] 



GOAKS AND HUMOUR 

" Coasting on a good horse is superb, but 
should be under control." 

I should like to hear Professor Freud's views 
on the hidden implications of this. 



[291] 



A CORNER OF OLD ENGLAND 

It has been maintained that war is indispen- 
sable because it teaches people geography. I 
will not discuss the merits or the defects of that 
doctrine here, and I freely admit that in August, 
1914, I knew nothing of the situation of Brest- 
Litovsk or Bourlon Wood. But the illumina- 
tion of war is only local, and, since I have to 
mention the Southern Appalachians, I had bet- 
ter explain what they are. They are a range 
of mountains, or, rather, an extensive mountain 
district running from the Pennsylvania border, 
through the Virginias, Kentucky, the Carolinas, 
and Tennessee into the northern parts of Geor- 
gia and Alabama. Here Mrs. O. D. Campbell 
and Mr. Cecil Sharp (to whom we owe the 
recovery of many of our old country songs) 
have been hunting for English Folk Songs. The 
results of their explorations are published by 
Messrs. Putnam; the book is a romance. 

The Southern Appalachian region is a large 
one, larger than Great Britain. Mr. Sharp has, 
therefore, covered as yet no more than small 
[292] 



A CORNER OF OLD ENGLAND 

portions of it, chiefly in the " Laurel Country " 
of North Carolina. In that region he had expe- 
riences which, to an imaginative man, must have 
been as thrilling as anything that has ever hap- 
pened to an explorer in Central Africa or Bor- 
neo. It is mountainous, thickly wooded, and 
very secluded. There are few roads, except 
mountain tracks; and scarcely any railroads. 
" Indeed, so remote and shut off from outside 
influence were, until quite recently, these se- 
questered mountain valleys that the inhabitants 
have for a hundred years or more been com- 
pletely isolated and cut off from all traflic with 
the rest of the world." I suppose this is a slight 
exaggeration: that, for instance, these Arca- 
dians, however fortunately sequestered, imported 
doctors, clothes, and tools. But one knows what 
Mr. Sharp means. Coming into their midst the 
travellers found themselves in a " pocket " of an 
old England which has disappeared. They found 
a strong, spare race; leisurely; easy and unaf- 
fected in their bearing, and with " the unself- 
conscious manners of the well-bred." They are 
mostly illiterate, and each family grows just 
what is needed to support life; but they are 
contented, quick-witted, and, in the truest sense, 
civilised. Their ancestors came, apparently, 
from the north of England; their religion is 

[293] 



LIFE AND LETTERS 

Calvinistic. Generations of freedom in America 
have undoubtedly modified some of their orig- 
inal characteristics. They drink and smoke very 
little and " commercial competition and social 
rivalries are unknown." But though in some 
regards they have customs peculiar to them- 
selves, in others they are more faithful transmit- 
ters of old English tradition than are the Eng- 
lish to-day: 

" Their speech is English, not American, and, 
from the number of expressions they use which 
have long been obsolete elsewhere and the old- 
fashioned way in which they pronounce many 
of their words, it is clear that they are talking 
the language of a past day, though exactly of 
what period I am not competent to decide." 

In that antique tongue they sing the old songs 
that their ancestors brought over from England 
in the time of George III. and perhaps still 
earlier. Here in England the folk-song col- 
lector always has to make straight for the Oldest 
Inhabitant. The young know few of the old 
songs, being supplied with music-hall songs from 
London and Berlin and rag-times from New 
York. In the Appalachians, where cosmopoli- 
tan music is unknown, the folk-song tradition 

[294] 



A CORNER OF OLD ENGLAND 

is as strong in the young as in the aged, and Mr. 
Sharp has, on occasion, drawn what he wanted 
from small boys. There, in log-huts and farm- 
steads, hundreds of miles west of the Atlantic 
coast, on uplands lying between Philadelphia 
and St. Louis, he found this people strayed from 
the eighteenth century using such phrases as 
" But surely you will tarry with us for the 
night," and singing, with a total unconscious- 
ness both of themselves and of their auditors, 
of woods and bowers, milk white steeds and dap- 
ple greys, lily-white hands, silver cups, the 
Northern Sea, London Bridge, and the gallows. 
He heard from these mountain singers The 
Golden Vanity, The Cherry Tree Carol, Lord 
Randal, The Wife of Ushefs Well, Lady Isa- 
bel and the Elf Knight, and scores of less well 
known ballads and songs, versions of which the 
collectors have for years been painfully picking 
up in Sussex, Somersetshire, Yorkshire, and 
Cornwall. It is a strange reflection that, had 
we left it a little later, we might have had to go 
to America for old folk music which had been 
totally lost on English soil. 

Mr. Sharp does not make it quite clear which 
of his songs are hitherto altogether unrecorded; 
he includes several ballads not in Child's collec- 
tion, but Child may have deliberately rejected 

[295] 



LIFE AND LETTERS 

them and they may have appeared elsewhere. 
Remarkably, he got no ritual songs, songs asso- 
ciated with harvest home, morris and sword 
dances, or the coming of English spring and the 
primroses. His hundred and twenty -two texts 
include only one carol and few songs touching 
on religion. The English rituals were not trans- 
planted; the festivals died out; the doctrines of 
the mountaineers deprecated dancing; and the 
spring of their new country was not the spring 
of their old. They are strongest in ballads, and 
in songs (like Shooting of His Dear) with sto- 
ries in them, which things lose nothing by trans- 
plantation across a hemisphere; and the songs 
are still living in the old way, growing and 
changing with the whims and memories of indi- 
vidual singers, yet always retaining the essential 
kernel. Nearly all the tunes are in " gapped 
scales," scales with only five or six notes to the 
octave; as always with folk songs they are pre- 
dominantly melancholy, and many of them are 
exceedingly beautiful. 

That Mr. Sharp's texts — or indeed those 
of folk songs as a whole — are in the bulk great 
poetry I will not maintain. At its least polished 
the folk song sinks to the level of this (sung by 
Mrs. Tom Rice, at Big Laurel, West Caro- 
lina) : 

[296] 



A CORNER OF OLD ENGLAND 

They hadn't been laying in bed but one hour 
When he heard the trumpet sound. 
She cried out with a thrilling cry: 
O Lord, O Lord, I'm ruined. 

This, possibly, is a corruption of something 
originally a little more rounded; a process simi- 
lar to that which works upon all folk songs 
and which (in the Appalachian versions of The 
Golden Vanity) gives the name of that good 
ship variously as the Weeping Willow Tree and 
the Golden Willow Tree, and provides a sister 
ship with the names of Golden Silveree and 
Turkey Silveree, which might strike even an 
Appalachian as an odd name for a vessel. We 
do not know in folk songs, as a rule, what is 
"original" and what is not; usually there has 
been so much accretion that there can hardly be 
said to be an " original " at all. The process is 
not productive of great verse, comparable with 
the masterpieces of form produced by poets with 
surnames, fountain-pens and identifiable tomb- 
stones, though often there is a poignancy about 
individual lines and stanzas which makes them 
very effective even when divorced from their ex- 
quisite tunes, which are the real triumphs of 
folk-production. Mr. Sharp's American collec- 
tion is certainly not, textually, superior to the 
English collections. But it does contain some 

[297] 



LIFE AND LETTERS 

fine things. It must have been queer to listen 
to The True Lover's Farewell coming from the 
lips of a woman in the American backwoods : 

O fare you well my own true love. 
So fare you well for a while, 
I'm going away, but I'm coming back 
If I go ten thousand mile. 

If I prove false to you, my love, 

The earth may melt and burn. 

The sea may freeze and the earth may burn 

If I no more return. 

Ten thousand miles, my own true love, 
Ten thousand miles or more; 
The rocks may melt and the sea may burn 
If I never no more return. 

And who will shoe your pretty little feet, 
Or who will glove your hand. 
Or who will kiss your red rosy cheek 
While I'm in the foreign land? 

My father will shoe my pretty little feet, 
My mother will glove my hand. 
And you can kiss my red rosy cheek 
When you return again. 

O don't you see yon little turtle dove, 
A-skipping from vine to vine 
A-mourning the loss of its own true love 
Just as I mourn for mine? 

[298] 



A CORNER OF OLD ENGLAND 

Don't you see yon pretty girl 
A-spinning on yonder wheel ? 
Ten thousand gay, gold guineas would I give 
To feel just like she feels. 

The end lets one down with a jerk; but the 
construction is perfect. 



[299] 



A POET'S PEDIGREE 

My eye was caught by a controversy in the 
Saturday Westminster. A reviewer had " char- 
acterised " as " a misleading statement " some- 
body's allegation that the poet Shelley " came 
of an ancient county family." It is the com- 
monest of observations that it was the strangest 
thing in the world that so imaginative, phan- 
tasmal, revolutionary a being as Shelley should 
have sprung from " a line of heavy country 
squires." Commentators always assume that 
the inheritor from such ancestors should live up 
to Charles Churchill's description of " some 
tenth transmitter of a foolish face." There was 
nothing surprising, therefore, in the fact that 
an indignant correspondent wrote in to dispute 
what the reviewer had said and to question his 
authority. The critic answered by referring his 
antagonist to John Addington Symonds's book 
on Shelley. It is there stated that Sir Bysshe 
Shelley, the poet's grandfather, " was born in 
North America and began life, as it is said, as 
a quack doctor." " Began life," is not a very 
[300] 



A POET'S PEDIGREE 

good way of putting it; one is reminded of the 
frequent merchant prince who has " come into 
the world without a penny in his pocket." But 
the meaning is clear, and Symonds goes on to 
say that Sir Bysshe was an adventurer who 
" succeeded in winning the hands and fortunes 
of two English heiresses." So the reviewer, 
whilst prepared to admit that the American 
Shelieys were members of the Sussex family, 
sticks to what is material in his point. 

The ancient and illustrious ancestry of the 
Sussex Shelieys is not a matter of dispute. A 
person of their name, or something near enough 
to it to entitle — or, at least, to encourage — a 
family claim, came over with that well-attended 
man the Conqueror and appears on the Roll of 
Battle Abbey. Another Sir Guyon de Shelley 
was a Crusader, and a Crusader of the first 
water. He it was who adopted the family coat. 
He hung three great conches or shells behind 
his shield. Each of these had miraculous prop- 
erties. A blast blown on one scattered foes like 
chaff; the sound of another would drive away 
the devil; and the third was reputed to have the 
power of compelling any woman to succumb to 
Sir Guyon's charms. How this is known is not 
clear, for we are told that he was far too up- 
right a man ever to use it. And it is to be 

[301] 



LIFE AND LETTERS 

presumed that he exercised a similar self -con- j 
trol with regard to the others; or, thus muni-i 
tioned, he would certainly have gone farther inj 
the world than he did. If it be contended that 
there is something mythical about Sir Guy on, 
who might have been the original of Sir Huon 
of Bordeaux, no such question can arise about 
the sixteenth-century Sir R. Shelley, who was 
Grand Prior of the Knights of Malta. His 
descendant. Sir John Shelley, of Maresfield, 
was a baronet of the original 1611 creation. It 
will be remembered that James I., who wanted 
money, invited and even compelled men of sub- 
stance to become baronets for £1000 apiece, 
thus affording modern practitioners an ancient 
precedent. This man had two sons — Sir Wil- 
liam, a judge of Common Pleas, and Edward. 
From Edward sprang Timothy, who, as Medwin 
says, " had two sons, and settled — having mar- 
ried an American lady — at Christ's Church, 
Newark, in North America; where Bysshe was 
born, on the 21st June, 1731." This Bysshe 
was Sir Bysshe, Percy Bysshe Shelley's grand- 
father. 

We may presume that the pedigree — which 

Mr. Buxton Forman gives — is sound, though 

there is often some doubt about pedigrees which 

have an American break in them. But there is 

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no doubt that if it be supposed that a " freak " 
like Shelley ought to have some unusual ancestor 
to inherit from Sir Bysshe is quite good enough. 
There is no need to go to so recent an authority 
as Symonds; for he and other modern writers 
go back to the foolish but racy Medwin for their 
authority. The transatlantic Bysshe, says Med- 
win, " exercised the profession of a quack doc- 
tor and married, it is said, the widow of a miller, 
but for this I cannot vouch." Dowden, who 
likes to tone down anything derogatory, even 
about Shelley's grandfather, refers to " rumours 
of some dim American bride," but says that 
Bysshe " must have made haste in wooing and 
wedding and burying his transatlantic wife, if 
ever she had existence," for he was not more 
than twenty-one when he married his second 
wife. But as the poet himself definitely states 
in a letter of 1812 that his grandfather " acted 
very ill to three wives," we may reasonably take 
it that the miller's widow existed, " in some 
shape or other." 

Before he was twenty-one, Bysshe Shelley 
had renounced quackery, buried (we must as- 
sume) his American wife, come to England, 
and, in Medwin's words, " captivated the great 
heiress of Horsham, the only daughter and heir- 
ess of the Rev. Theobald Michell." Her guar- 

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LIFE AND LETTERS 

dian forbade the marriage, so the couple eloped 
and " were wedded in that convenient asylum 
for lovers, the Fleet, by the Fleet parson." 
Having borne him three children (including 
Timothy, the poet's father), this wife died, 
within a few years, of smallpox. Medwin's 
possibly prejudiced account of the sequel be- 
gins: "After his wife's death, an insatiate for- 
tune-hunter, he laid siege to a second heiress in 
an adjoining county. In order to become ac- 
quainted with her, he took up his abode for some 
time in a small inn on the verge of the Park at 
Penshurst." The lady was Miss Sidney Pery, 
and again there was an elopement; it suggests 
that he had at least a great superficial fascina- 
tion and that he had not been a quack doctor 
for nothing. Late in life, Bysshe Shelley was 
given a baronetcy in order that his electioneer- 
ing interest might be secured for the Whigs. 
He became a great miser, and " his manner " 
(Medwin again) "of life was most eccentric, 
for he used to frequent daily the tap-room of 
one of the low inns at Horsham, and there drank 
with some of the lowest citizens, a habit he had 
probably acquired in the New World." His life 
was very prolonged, and his son is alleged to 
have obtained daily bulletins of his health, 
though we may doubt this. Two of his daugh- 
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A POET'S PEDIGREE 

ters eloped as he had done, and he cut them out 
of his will. The good Professor Dowden's allu- 
sions to him are very taking. He calls him " a 
gentleman of the old school, with a dash " [my 
italics] " of New World cleverness, push, and 
mammon-worship." " Stately old Sir Bysshe," 
proceeds the professor, " impressed the towns- 
folk as melancholy; perhaps, said they, he was 
' crossed in love ' in his youth." Sir Bysshe may 
have been libelled by Medwin, but it is absurd 
to be sentimental about him. Dowden, sum- 
marising his achievements, says that " he achieved 
greatness by bold and dexterous strokes." Bold 
and dexterous, indeed! 

This, as Froude said of the Saint, is " all and 
more than all, that is known " of Shelley's 
American grandfather. It may fairly be argued 
by those who attach importance to such mat- 
ters, that, whatever the ultimate descent in the 
male line may be, the statement that Shelley 
sprang from a line of Sussex squires requires 
qualification, as it were, both in spirit and in 
matter. For most of us, we are not greatly dis- 
turbed by such questions. We let the genealo- 
gists, and the biologists, and the sociologists 
arouse themselves with them, but we should be 
quite as prepared to see Shelley springing from 
a line of greengrocers as from a line of bucca- 

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LIFE AND LETTERS 

neers. What porridge had John Keats? why 
that lapse into classicism on the part of a livery- 
stable keeper's son? Where did Blake get his 
wildness from; where did William Morris get 
his ; whence came the volcanic turbulence of Mr. 
Alfred Noyes? Not, as far as I know, from 
father or grandfather. Genius appears any- 
where, and we should have no sound reason for 
surprise had Shelley sprung, as an eminent, but 
too precise, modern is said to have done, from 
" a long line of maiden aunts." 

On the other hand, if we must look for un- 
usual people in an unusual man's pedigree, 
whose pedigree — and remember both female and 
male descents count in this matter — is free from 
them? It is always assumed in such arguments 
that any kind of " unusualness " will do. Mad- 
ness and genius are allied; and so, argue the 
school of Rougon-Macquart, are artistic power, 
boldness in swindling, excess in vice. Which of 
us, if he goes back a few generations on both 
sides, cannot find an ancestor sufficiently eccen- 
tric or sufficiently degenerate to serve quite ade- 
quately as an ancestor for Shakespeare himself? 



[306] 



RABELAIS 

It is observed by Rabelais himself that those 
who have read " the pleasant titles of some 
books of our invention," such as Pease and Ba- 
con with a Commentary, " are too ready to 
judge that there is nothing in them but jests, 
mockeries, lascivious discourse, and recreative 
lies"; but "the subject thereof is not so foolish 
as by the title at the first sight it should appear 
to be." Were one not faced with incitements 
to speculation about meaning on every page, 
this would be sufficient excuse for the commen- 
tators and explorers. But these gentlemen 
would do well to remember a later remark of 
the author's about " a certain gulligut friar and 
true bacon-picker " who tried to get incredible 
allegories out of Ovid: 

" If you give no credit thereto, why do not 
you the same in these jovial new chronicles of 
mine? Albeit when I did dictate them, I 
thought upon no more than you, who possibly 
were drinking the whilst as I was. For in the 

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LIFE AND LETTERS 

composing of this lordly book, I never lost nor 
bestowed any more, nor any other time than 
what was appointed to serve me for taking of 
my bodily refection, that is, whilst I was eating 
and drinking. And indeed, that is the fittest 
and most proper hour wherein to write these 
high matters and deep sciences; as Homer knew 
very well, the paragon of all philologues, and 
Ennius, the father of the Latin poets, as Hor- 
ace calls him, although a certain sneaking job- 
bernol alleged that his verses smelled more of 
the wine than oil." 

An accusation which Rabelais calls " an honour 
and a praise." 

Our ancestors tended to regard Rabelais as 
purely a buffoon. Their imaginary portraits 
of him were much like their portraits of Fal- 
staff. Modern research has recovered a good 
many details of his industrious life, and shown 
how vast is the learning and how purposeful 
much of the satire of his great book. It has 
even been decided that the only portrait with 
the slightest claim to authenticity is one which 
gives him weary eyes, sunken cheeks, a wispy 
beard, and a forehead like a ploughed field. 
Some of the results of the immense mass of 
modern French investigation are tabulated in 

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RABELAIS 

Mr. W. F. Smith's Rabelais in His Writings, 
published by the Cambridge University Press, 
and Mr. Smith makes a good many conjectures 
of his own. Among his arguments some are 
not exactly conclusive. It is not very satisfy- 
ing to be told that Rabelais was not, as used 
to be supposed, born in 1483; he was always 
exact about facts, and we can (we are told) 
deduce with certainty from his own writings 
that he was born in 1494, " about 1494 or 1495," 
or else in 1489. It is not much use to know 
that his statements of facts were accurate when 
you don't know which were his statements of 
facts. But his history has been very much am- 
plified; we know where he went and when he 
wrote much better than we did; and the nature 
of his reading and references is being gradually 
cleared up. In one regard, at least, the tendency 
of modern students is significant. When re- 
search on him began, the inclination was to read 
great affairs into his every chapter. It is now 
certain that the war between Grandgousier and 
Picrochole represents nothing more than a law- 
suit between Rabelais' father (who is no longer 
alleged to have been an innkeeper as the robust 
old tradition had it) and a neighbouring land- 
lord over riparian rights. But the point to 
remember (in the light of the introduction to 

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LIFE AND LETTERS 

Gargantua, if our own sense doesn't guide us) 
is that the raw material of Rabelais ceases to be 
important after he has used it. He may have 
amused himself as much as he liked by using 
real characters, incidents, and events in his nar- 
rative, but the fairy-tale he made out of them is 
the thing that matters. The war between those 
two kings was not written merely in order to 
record this insignificant law-suit; when Friar 
John of the Funnels, " by his prowess and valour 
discomfited all those of the army that entered 
into the close of the abbey, unto the number of 
thirteen thousand, six hundred, twenty and two, 
besides the women and little children, which is 
always to be understood," Rabelais had forgot- 
ten all about the fishing rights of Rabelais pere 
and was merely thinking of his own amusement 
anl perhaps of the grinning faces of his 
hospital patients, for whose amusement the 
first two books are alleged to have been 
written. 

The scholars must not, in fact, begin to make 
him smell more of the oil than of the wine., 
They have demonstrated that he was not a 
drunkard — though anyone with half an eye 
could see that; but they now tend to suggest 
rather that he was a teetotaler. They prove 
that he was an eminent physician, a successful 
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RABELAIS 

lecturer, a trusted diplomatist, an erudite theo- 
logian, a great Humanist, a Church reformer, a 
linguist, a lawyer, a traveller, an expert in 
architecture and the military art, and Lord 
knows what else ; and they almost lose sight of 
the fact that, whatever else he was, he was a 
jolly old dog. Here, for instance, is Mr. Smith, 
who has patience, judgment, learning, and who 
certainly would not be spending his life upon 
such an author if he did not relish him. Yet 
his book is completely humourless, lacking in 
high spirits or even relish, and unilluminated 
even by the quotations from the text which 
might give balance to it. One cannot help 
thinking that if the spirit of Rabelais himself, 
looking down from the clouds over the lid of a 
tankard of nectar, should descry these books on 
the work which he dedicated with a " Ho ! Ye 
most illustrious drinkers," he would be tempted 
to add a few more items to that long catalogue 
of imaginary pedantry with which he filled his 
Library of St. Victor, and which includes 
Quaestio suhtilissima, utrum chimaera in vacuo 
bomhinans possit comedere secundas intentiones, 
and Marmotretus de baboonis et apis, cum Com- 
mento Dorbellis. 

In fact, after I had read Mr. Smith's book — 
closely reasoned, carefully arranged, clearly ex- 

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LIFE AND LETTERS 

pressed, as it is — I had to go back to Rabelais 
and read a few remembered passages in order 
to remind myself that neither reform nor auto- 
biographical history were his prime interest. I 
read of that storm during which Panurge, as 
white as chalk, chattered, " Be, be, be, bous, 
bous, bous." I read the debate on Marrying or 
not Marrying, and the Discourse of the Drink- 
ers, the finest reproduction of the chatter of a 
crowd enjoying themselves which exists any- 
where in literature. I read the great formal 
address wherewith Master Janotus de Brag- 
mardo besought Gargantua to return to the 
people of Paris the bells of Our Lady's Church 
which he had carried off on the neck of his 
mare, and which opens: 

" Hem, hem, gud-day, sire, gud-day. Et vo- 
bis, my masters. It were but reason that you 
should restore to us our bells; for we have great 
need of them. Hem, hem, aihfuhash. We have 
oftentimes heretofore refused good money for 
them of those of London in Cahors, yea, and 
those of Bordeaux in Brie, who would have 
bought them for the substantific quality of the 
elementary complexion, which is intronificated 
on the terrestreity of their quidditative nature, 
to extraneize the blasting mists and whirlwinds 

[312] 



RABELAIS 

upon our vines, indeed not ours, but these round 
about us." 

And I read that most perfect chapter of all 
" of the qualities and conditions of Panurge," 
who " was of a middle stature, not too high nor 
too low, and had somewhat of an aquiline nose, 
made like the handle of a razor," who was " nat- 
urally subject to a kind of disease which at that 
time they called lack of money," and who " was 
a wicked, lewd rogue, a cozener, drinker, roister, 
rover, and a very dissolute and debauched fel- 
low, if there were any in Paris; otherwise, and 
in all matters else, the best and most virtuous 
man in the world." And, having thus read, I 
felt sure again that although it is interesting to 
know that the idea of Panurge came out of an 
Italian macaronic romance, and probably out 
of fifty-seven other places as well, it really does 
not greatly matter; any more than that "fair 
great book " which Panurge wrote, but which 
" is not printed yet that I know of." 

Still, it is ridiculous not to be thankful for 
the book one will use. This is especially so when, 
in England, Rabelaisian literature is so scarce. 
No English biographer has thought it worth 
while to write a really big book on him; and 
beyond Professor Saintsbury (who had a mag- 

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LIFE AND LETTERS 

nificent chapter on him in his recent History of 
the French Novel) and two industrious Cam- 
bridge dons, scarcely any living English critic 
has attempted to do him justice. He is not even 
widely read; except by schoolboys who get hold 
of nasty paper-covered editions of him because 
he was in the habit of plastering his pages with 
unpleasant, and, in print, unusual words. He 
cannot be excused — as some have attempted to 
excuse him — from the charge of a verbal coarse- 
ness unparalleled in any other great modern 
writer. But his gigantic humour, his inexhaus- 
tibly happy language, his knowledge of man- 
kind, his wisdom, and the generosity of his 
spirit, have made him the secular Bible of a suc- 
cession of English writers (amongst whom, a 
little surprisingly, was Charles Kingsley), and 
there are many men living who would find him 
equally companionable if only they would once 
try him. They need not even bother about read- 
ing him in the original. For the seventeenth 
century translation by Sir Thomas Urquhart of 
Cromartie (concluded, not quite so superbly, by 
Peter Motteux) is one of the great translations 
of the world, unequalled by any other transla- 
tion in our language, a miracle in its constant 
re-creation of what cannot be literally rendered 
from the French into our own tongue. 

[314] 



FAME AFTER DEATH 

I HAVE been reading an author unduly neg- 
lected. There are many. Our literature is full 
of minor classics which from time to time are 
galvanised into life by new editions, and then 
relapse into ahnost complete oblivion, a few 
bookish people cherishing them and no one else 
mentioning them. These resent the neglect. 
They feel that injustice is being done if a fa- 
v^ourite book is omitted from histories of litera- 
ture or is unknown to people who would appre- 
ciate it. And there is no doubt that the injus- 
tice is felt as an injustice to the author person- 
ally, though he be long dead and unaware of 
men's speech and their silence. This feeling 
springs unconsciously, perhaps, from the knowl- 
edge that if a man writes a good book one of 
his main motives, almost always, is posthumous 
fame. He wishes his name and his personality 
to survive him; posterity must think well of 
him; it must know that a man lived who was 
fully up to its own best standards, a man intel- 
lectually as acute, emotionally as quick, mor- 

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LIFE AND LETTERS 

ally as sound as the latest births of time. " I 
think," said the dying Keats, " that I shall be 
among the English poets after I die " ; " Not 
marble, nor the gilded monuments of princes," 
wrote Shakespeare, " shall outlast this powerful 
rhyme." The predictions indicate the prepos- 
sessions. We still see through their eyes and 
feel with their hearts, find ourselves in them 
and them in ourselves. But posthumous fame is 
not always of this quality; and the neglect we 
spoke of is not the only kind of neglect. 

For, thinking of those authors whose names 
are kept but dimly and intermittently alive, of 
those books (not of the first order) in the sur- 
vival or revival of which chance seems so nota- 
bly to operate, I thought of those whose names 
survive detached from their works, or of whom 
the names are universally respected whilst the 
works are generally ignored. There are Anglo- 
Saxon poets, Caedmon and Cynewulf, whose 
names come easy to the lips of all literate men; 
but who reads them save an occasional editor 
and an infrequent examinee? Langland, of 
Piers Plowman, is another such. He is uni- 
versally regarded as our greatest writer before 
Chaucer, but how many times a year does any- 
body open his book, and how many of those who 
would never omit him from any list of the 

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FAME AFTER DEATH 

illustrious dead, are in contact with him or have 
any first-hand basis for their belief in his great- 
ness? Writing of Chaucer's successors, the late 
Churton Collins, a candid if a narrow man, re- 
marked that " What Voltaire said of Dante is 
literally true of such poets as Henryson, Doug- 
las, and Dunbar. We simply take them on 
trust." And there are a great many others 
whom most of us take on trust. It would be 
foolish to suggest that no one ever reads the 
Faerie Queen through, and we know that from 
time to time Spenser, the great artist, has pro- 
foundly affected the art of his successors. But 
what proportion of those who put him amongst 
the four greatest of our poets habitually read his 
masterpiece, or, in fact, have ever read it at all? 
How many who mechanically do reverence to 
his name are secretly of opinion that his works 
are extremely dull? Is he read in England 
any more than Confucius is? And in some de- 
gree does not this divorce between fame and 
familiarity, the existence of established and un- 
challenged reputation which is also mainly un- 
tested, affect also such great figures as Ben 
Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, and Dryden, 
and such lesser ones as Richardson and Jeremy 
Taylor? They are labelled; they have, after 
whatever early vicissitudes, been put on their 

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LIFE AND LETTERS 

respective shelves, and scholars provide the gen- 
eral public with the facts about them and the 
justifications for their position. But Spenser 
does not live as Shelley lives, nor Dry den as 
Jane Austen. The range of their personal ac- 
cess is far narrower than that of their celebrity. 
In the farthest extremity, there survive from 
classical times illustrious names to which no 
works are attached at all; they are spoken of 
with respect; they must not be missed out on 
any account; but we know nothing of the men 
beyond their names. And this, which is an un- 
common occurrence in the sphere of literature, 
is in other spheres common; for our dim and 
inchoate early records have handed down to us 
the names of thousands of monarchs and war- 
riors who meant to leave their marks on the 
world, whose names do reverberate through the 
ages, and of whom we know nothing more. 
What was Sennacherib like? What, beyond 
their names, did Hengist and Horsa leave be- 
hind them? And, dreaming of that posthumous 
life which is so usual a human ambition, would 
they have been satisfied to know that they would 
survive only in a mere verbal repetition of the 
names they bore? 

Probably they would have preferred that to 
nothing. This passion is beyond reason. Rea- 

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FAME AFTER DEATH 

son tells us that time is long and eternity longer, 
that all civilisations pass, and that in the end all 
records fade. We cannot, looking ahead, visual- 
ise millions of years of accumulated reputations. 
Old fames must die as new fames grow, and 
accident may wipe them out with more than 
normal rapidity. " What poets sang in Atlan- 
tis ? " asks a modern poet. We know what they 
must have felt, but we do not know who they 
were; and the tidal wave that suddenly sub- 
merged that fabled continent is but a violent 
and abrupt symbol of the decay and oblivion 
that ultimately must overcome all the works of 
men. We may be established as we think. We 
may at last have driven firm piles in that 
morass into which past civilisations have con- 
stantly relapsed. The last of the barbarian in- 
vasions may be over; our scientific fabric may 
not, within thinkable time, collapse; the ordered 
progress of the Victorian vision may be ahead 
and may last through aeons. But even so — and 
it is a large postulate — the vessel's wake cannot 
indefinitely be kept in sight. There will be a 
horizon to each age, beyond which the knowl- 
edge and interest of details far behind will fade. 
They will have new Shakespeares and new 
Spensers; our sonnets will have gone like our 
marble and the gilded monuments of our princes, 

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LIFE AND LETTERS 

beyond the range even of archaeologists. And 
in the end what prospect does reason, working 
on the supposed facts that are now provided 
her, offer? A cooling and a disappearance. A 
void and frozen world circling in space, and a 
watching moon that has outlasted all mortal 
fames and seen the ultimate Shakespeare pass 
and die, leaving no more permanent trace than 
Hodge at his plough or the slaves that worked 
on the pyramids. We know all that, yet know- 
ing it makes no difference. For fame after 
death, however uncertain and however perish- 
able, men will work, starve, and bear with cheer- 
fulness the neglect of their contemporaries; in 
the last resort they are content that for some 
term, the limits of which they shrink from con- 
templating, the mere syllables of their names 
should be known and spoken, like the names of 
schoolboys cut on desks or the initials of lovers 
on trees. Is it strange that the meditative, con- 
templating so peculiar a phenomenon, should 
have found in this mania, otherwise so stupid 
and perverse, the inexplicable reflection of a 
deep consciousness of immortality? 

THE END 



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